


radiance

by rainingover



Series: songs about stars (an nct space!verse) [2]
Category: NCT (Band), WAYV
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Future, Alternate Universe - Space, Angst, Class Differences, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Escorts/Prostitution, Falling In Love, Forbidden Love, Found Families, Friendship, Love/Hate, Lucas is bad at poker, M/M, Melancholy, Nightclubs in space, Outer Space, Secret Relationship, Space Cadet College is a thing, Space Stations, references to sex and alcohol and prostitution
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-23
Updated: 2019-04-23
Packaged: 2020-01-25 13:58:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 25,876
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18575887
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rainingover/pseuds/rainingover
Summary: “The Halos aren’t wild.” He speaks solemnly, his mouth so near Hendery's ear he can feel Xiaojun’s breath. “They’redangerous, you need to know that," he says, and then he kisses Hendery on the mouth again, like he’s trying to kiss some sense into him.(Hendery is lost, Xiaojun is looking to escape and they meet in a nightclub with no name.)





	radiance

**Author's Note:**

> This story is set in the same universe as [a fallen star (fell from your heart)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/17719487), which is a tiny 1k Ten focused piece. Ten's character is mentioned a few times in this story but this story can definitely also be read as a stand-alone! 
> 
> There is a playlist for this story called In Orbit which you can listen to [right here!](https://open.spotify.com/user/e3xrbiz7o8brnyiknglso5n8g/playlist/3mxED3xTZHJFyMk5edR3Za?si=55Ro-fQbQdqXWT1OCLRPkw) ♥
> 
> (this is longer than i expected to to be - i kind of fell down a rabbit hole with this story. apologies to a & r for putting up with me while i wrote it!
> 
> I hope someone likes it. as always, if something needs tagging please don't hesitate to tell me. feedback is forever welcome. kiss kiss kisses for your faces.)

 

Hendery is born in the pristine hospital wing reserved for Elite families on the South of the station to parents who hate each other only slightly at the time. He is admitted into cadet college with no entrance examination results, because his father pays off the board instead. Things do happen between these events: a childhood of great expectations and disappointing reality, but it’s these two that pretty much sum up the way Hendery gets through life.

He never wants for anything - at least, that's what his father always tells him.

"You have everything you need. You want for nothing and you will _not_ be a disappointment to me," he says, and then he makes a disappointed tsking noise with his tongue and pushes his chair back from the breakfast table. "You will study harder, you will take our family name seriously and you will _not_ embarrass me. Do you hear me?"

It sounds like a threat, a verbal knife at Hendery’s throat, freshly sharpened and unyielding, but he’s been here a thousand times and it’s starting to sound like white noise. He tries hard not to roll his eyes. He looks at his mother, who sips her coffee silently. She averts her eyes from the scene at the table, suddenly oh-so interested in the Window set to Mars Mode #2, which is _not_ an interesting setting. Hendery bites his tongue.

"What are you going to do tonight?" His father presses the question with a steel gaze. His face is set into hard lines and his expression bears no love, no kindness or concern whatsoever. This isn’t unusual.

Hendery stares back, mirrors him. "I’m going to study," he replies.

"That's right. And tomorrow night, and the night after that?"

"Study, I’ll study again." Hendery echoes. He smiles at his father - polite, like is expected of him - but his father doesn't smile back.

“You’ll do as you are told.” His father gets up from the table, dropping his napkin onto his plate. “And you’ll have a good life ahead of you. But tonight you _will_ study, or at least pretend.” 

Hendery doesn't study that night. He doesn’t even pretend.

Even if he fails his exams, his father will bribe the right people and he’ll be assigned to a good role on the space station, if only so his father can boast about him to other people. Maybe he’ll become a galactic strategy director or the head of a trade department, but whatever he becomes, he won’t get a say in it. And, yes, if he has to fake Hendery’s examination results his father will be angry, and he might shout, might lash out, but at least it’ll be something real - raw emotion, unlike the quiet seething and false smiles that usually grace their family home.

Hendery might accept that he’s resistless to what is expected of him, but he’ll do it reluctantly.

He VideoLinks Yangyang clips of him trying to fit his fist in his mouth, and Yangyang live VideoLinks him back from Lucas's apartment, where they're making plans to source moonshine and drink it on Friday night after their Retention Processing training on the South side of the station.

Hendery lies down on his bed grins at them - he's so damn glad to be talking to his friends and not the emotionally repressed statues he gets to call his parents. "How will we even get a hold of that stuff?" he asks, rolling onto his back and holding his Link above his face.

"The cargo ships bring it back over after they stop at the Halos," Yangyang says, as though it's common knowledge. He’s showing off, which is easy for him to do because he _does_ know his shit, Hendery and Lucas will happily admit this, even to his face. "There are people who sell it at the port."

"I knew that," Hendery lies. He doesn’t want to look like the sheltered elite that he is, even if it is just in front of his two best friends.

"No you didn't!" Lucas laughs. He's always _so_ loud and Hendery has to turn down the volume on his device so his parents won’t hear. "But that’s cool, 'cos neither did I.”

Hendery laughs with him, feels suddenly stupid for worrying about their approval - he has it regardless of what he does or doesn’t know, which is pretty cool. "Alright then, I'm in on the plan."

His friends erupt into cheer, and he has to turn down the volume on his device even further.

The moonshine that comes in that weekend is, according to Yangyang,  just the tip of the iceberg where illegal substances made on the Halos is concerned. The Halos are a group of smaller hub-stations, breakaways from the main station that either chose or were forced to disassociate themselves with Control years and years ago. These little communities float above the main station in a ring, like a crown or an angel's halo - hence their name. Where the station is order, the Halos are chaotic. Where the station is the future, the Halos are a relic. Where the station has clear boundaries between what is and isn't acceptable, the Halos are limitless - not bound by rank and regulation.

At least, that's what people say, according to Yangyang.

Hendery can’t say that what happens next is all Yangyang’s fault, not this time, because it’s _him_ that suggests they hitch a ride to the Halo hub-station in secret to try out the synthetic vodkas and much whispered about nightlife. Hendery is tipsy when he suggests it, Yangyang's smile a flash of white in the dark room (Window view set to Deep Space #4 - never ending stars on a blanket of infinite blackness) as he giggles.

Lucas is sleeping across the room, snoring gently as they whisper, and it's probably for the best, because he's their friend, but he's loud and he's noticeable, and they'll never get off the station secretly if he comes along.

 

 

 

They decide to visit in two weeks time, when a cargo ship carrying supplies across the galaxy to another station is planning to dock for refueling after the main port has closed for the night.

The cargo ship is leaving the dock a little after eleven, so they make their way to the port while trying their hardest to act inconspicuously, which is a mean feat considering that Ten told them once that they haven’t a subtle bone between them. Lucas calls Yangyang’s VokalLink to ask what they’re up to and Yangyang falters at first, but in the end he tells Lucas their exact plan in one long, excited, breath.

It was inevitable.

"Okay, we'll wait but hurry up," Yangyang says into his Link after waiting for Lucas to reply. "We're getting on the last Cargo ship to leave for Sector Eleven, it's in docking bay four and stopping at Halo V on the way. That’s where we’re going."

"Shhh!" Hendery nudges his friend. The dock is still fairly busy - it's an intergalactic hub with round the clock activity - and at this time of the evening, a lot of the ship workers are starting to flock back to their homes from the cargo ships docked up for the night. Less people are waiting to leave the space station, but there are just enough people meandering nearby to be able to blend in.

It's not that visiting the Halos is _illegal_ as such, but they're a hotbed of untoward activity, and it's frowned upon by many to visit them, which is exactly why Hendery and Yangyang have always been so fascinated by them. Hendery knows his father would _riot_ if he found out what he was upto, and it scares him and exhilarates him both.

Lucas joins them just in time for boarding, his face flushed from rushing there, and as they step aboard the ship, sliding the doorman the fee for their transportation as they go, Lucas whispers into Hendery's ear, "This is gonna be a wild night!"

"That's what we're hoping," Hendery replies, turning to grin at their friend.

They really don't know what they're getting themselves into, and if this was a movie, Hendery thinks later that there'd probably be an ominous score playing over their scene.  Still, he's excited at the prospect of cheap liquor, as well as the prospect of maybe even getting an ill-advised tattoo - he's nineteen and he’s bored, and doing something his parents wouldn’t approve of seems strangely alluring.

Living on the station is better than being the tiny section of humanity who remain on Earth - he’s been told that countless times growing up - but it’s boring as hell. Control like their citizens to live on the straight and narrow, but he doesn't want to be straight _or_ narrow, whatever that means. He wants to let loose and taste moonshine. He’ll kiss someone pretty if he’s lucky, but he won’t hold out too much hope for it.

It's predictably difficult  to rebel when you're the son of an Elite commander, but there's _always_ a way to and he's doing it now, crammed into the back of a rogue cargo ship heading to Sector Eleven, but making a couple of unscheduled stops at the Halos first. Hendery chews at the inside of his cheek and glances around at the other people who have stowed away with them. If he and Yangyang thought they were looking inconspicuous before, with their tidy haircuts and regulation sneakers, they were very wrong. A woman with an amazingly intricate tattoo of interwinding snakes across her head and neck narrows her eyes at him, and he realises he's staring.

He looks away, suddenly very interested in the side of Yangyang's head and hopes he hasn’t started any trouble.

Lucas looks over at him and gives him a thumbs up. "Thanks for the invite." He grins. "I've always wanted to party on the Halo stations."

"You only learnt about the existence of the Halos, like, a month ago," Yangyang points out with a giggle. He flinches to avoid Lucas' friendly punch to his arm. "I'm just saying! It’s true!"

Hendery laughs, his nerves (because he has them, although he won’t admit it), dissipating slightly as he watches his friends playfight. Tonight will be fun. Tonight they can forget about Control and about graduating from training school and their upcoming Assignment into regiments. Hendery's father expects him to make it into a managerial position with ease, but then his father doesn't know him very well at all, and he definitely doesn't know how many of his study classes Hendery has skipped to mess around with his friends. Or, if he does, he's pretending not to.  That's all he and his parents seem to do: pretend around each other. But Hendery doesn't want to pretend tonight.

 He tries not to think about home, pushing the worry he’s a disappointment to the back of his mind, because in only forty nine more minutes they'll be at Halo V and the very first thing they intend to do is find somewhere to dance, drink and let go.

 

 

 

 

 

The streets of the Halo are loud and they're thick with smoke. The air is alive with the strong smells of spices, vegetables being grilled on a metal grill set up outside a shop on their right. He peers over at the kebabs of tomatoes and peppers dusted with spices that are probably synthetic but still smell amazing. Hendery wonders if it’s places like this that mean Control have to employ people in Provision Retention on the station - anything to make sure they have the majority share of produce in the galaxy. He wonders how difficult it is for these stalls to get a hold of produce and whether it's all done on the black-market, or whether Control let them have rations like they do with the people who are left Assigned to jobs on Earth.

"Hungry?" Lucas asks him, peering over at the trays of food with interest.

“Not yet,” Hendery replies. “I want a drink first.”

“I like your thinking.” Lucas claps his hands together. He is buzzing with anticipation, his eyes gleaming as they continue on through the streets, passing flashing signs for moonshine and massages, and doorways blocked by women with shimmering, dyed hair and eyebrows that definitely doesn’t fit with Control guidelines on appropriate appearance. Hendery wishes he could dye his hair, maybe a midnight blue would be cool: not too extreme, he thinks, but not the plain black he’s had all of his life. He’d like that.

Yangyang is grinning from ear to ear as they pass by another stall, this time selling hair-pieces to weave into long hair. “This is crazy,” he gushes. “It’s just like I’ve read about!”

“It’s pretty cool,” Hendery agrees. “I feel relaxed already.”

“That’s probably because they’re pumping hedonistic fumes out of the vent in that club to entice people in.” Yangyang points out a small vent on the front wall of the building to their left.

“How do you know all of this?” Lucas looks bewildered, but kind of in awe.

“I’ve been doing research, stupid.” Yangyang skips to avoid anymore punches to his side from their friend. “We may be reckless but we’re also well read. We’re _Elites._ ”

Lucas laughs, loud and happy, and Hendery feels incredibly glad that he’s here with two of his closest friends, even if they’re drawing far too much attention to themselves with their regulation jackets and their clipped accents.

“I just want to get drunk and dance,” he says as they weave past a group of ship workers with non-regulation studded boots and jackets. Maybe they’re a gang, he thinks. He’s heard about the gangs of narcotics sellers and the rebels against Control, although he’s pretty sure that he’s been fed a one-sided story about them by the government. They don’t look too mean to him, just different. Then again, the knives at their hips suggest otherwise.  “Let’s not go much further before we choose somewhere to check out,” he says.  

He’s pretty sure it wouldn’t be wise to get too lost out here.

They end up in a club that appears to have no actual name. It’s distinguished from the other, more unassuming doors along a row of buildings by three big neon signs above it that show a skull, the silhouette of a naked woman and a disco ball, in that order.

They pay the doorman with old Earth currency, which Yangyang had managed to negotiate with Mark for back on the station. Mark had a contact on Earth - a cousin or a family friend, no one was sure - who sent up packages of vintage currencies, artefacts and curiosities for a fee paid in the digital currency that was now used by everyone living on the stations.

“Back when everyone still lived on Earth, there were lots of different currencies,” Yangyang is telling Lucas - lording his Earthly knowledge over him with a butter-wouldn’t-melt smile. “These are Euros, see. They’re having a resurgence up on the Halos apparently. If you want to get things without questions they’re what to use up here,” he explains, and the way that that door man barely looks at them as they pass him at the door, despite the fact they’re clearly strangers to this part of the galaxy, suggests he’s right.

Inside the club, it’s dark, and it’s loud, and it’s hot. The bass travels through Hendery’s whole body as the music thumps around the room like the pulse of something alive. It's an assault on all of his senses and nothing like anything he's experienced before, and he _loves_ it. The three of them have tried to recreate this sort of atmosphere before - switched the Window view in Yangyang’s place to Earth mode #9 (cityscape nightview: hundreds of windows, lights flickering behind them), played music at full volume and danced in their cadet training gear, laughing at each other and filming dumb videos on their VideoLinks until they're exhausted, but it turns out that is nothing like the real thing.

No, messing around on in their bedrooms seems plain dumb now, and it’s nowhere near like being in a Halo club, with bodies close all around them, the sweet smell of moonshine in the air and the music taking over completely - taking up the space inside every tiny inch of his body. There are podiums in the corners of the room, lit in purple lights, with people dancing on top of them. He watches as a woman with a snake tattoo similar to the one he saw on the cargo ship had contorts herself into a back-bend and then out of it again with finesse.

On another podium, someone is riding a mechanical structure that jolts him in different directions, except the result is smooth and serene. Hendery watches as he moves with the machine, rolling his body in time with the music, head back, eyes closed. It's weirdly mesmerising, and it isn't until Yangyang shouts something he can't distinguish down his ear, that Hendery finally looks away.

Lucas shrugs off his jacket and rolls the sleeves of his shirt up past his elbows. He looks a little less like he doesn't belong, now, even if his shirt is crisp white and far too neat. "This is insane!”

"It's amazing. This is the best idea you have ever had." Yangyang's eyes are gleaming with excitement as he shakes at Hendery's shoulders. "Ever, ever!"

Hendery thinks naively, that he may just be right.

They order drinks, and then more drinks. Hendery loses his jacket somewhere along the line, but it doesn't seem to matter. The music is getting louder, the beat hypnotising, and he just wants to move, to drink and have fun. He doesn't want to think about where his jacket is, or whether he'll have a headache after he's drunk so much illegal booze.

He doesn't want to think about graduating as an Elite Cadet and the fact that he has no idea what he wants to do or who he wants to be, except for that he isn't sure he wants anything but to be himself. So, he doesn't.

Yangyang pulls shapes that look dangerous while Lucas accepts shots of clear, smoking, liquid from strangers with hair dyed in rainbow colours. Hendery wishes he could have rainbow hair. Maybe he can one day, he thinks, and it makes him feel warm inside. Lucas appears at his side and hands him a shot of the liqueur, and Hendery closes his eyes and tips it back, taking a sip. It burns his throat as he swallows, and when he opens his eyes again the world is sharper, the lights brighter.

Yangyang dances in blurred circles and it makes Hendery laugh, a giddy sound that escapes him without warning, and then Lucas is laughing too, and everything feels fantastic. He even finds his jacket, which it turns out was over his arm the whole time. It makes him laugh happily, and Lucas and Yangyang continue to laugh with him too, the three of them in a never-ending cycle of giggles.

Hendery watches the person on the podium, thighs still clasped tightly around the mechanical contraption he rides. It’s different to the other performances; it’s more intimate, and it fills him with a wistful sort of captivation. He watches the guy up there tip his head back and run his fingers through loose locks of dark hair. The spotlight on him bathes him in a golden glow, hazy and soft and mesmerising, and something stirs inside of Hendery that his father wouldn't be pleased about, so then his mind is back on graduation and the station and what is expected of him.

He needs another drink.

Hendery heads to the bar, eager to repay his friends generosity - after all, Yangyang got them into the club and Lucas had brought over the last round of drinks, so he owes them. He chooses three glasses of something the bartender calls LiquidHeaven. It's a synthetic vodka he'd heard of back home that is allowed on the station only in tiny, carefully regulated measures— measures that he is sure are less than a quarter of what is being poured out into glasses in front of him. He is excited for his friends to try it, to see their faces when they taste it, but when he gets back to the dance floor (after spilling some of the contents of one glass as he pushes through the crowds, unsteady on his feet) he can't find Yangyang or Lucas, and more of the drink spills out onto his boots as he searches for them to no avail.

He continues to make his way through the crowd, and then back past the bar, through winding corridors and into quieter corners of the club, where the bass still thumps but doesn't reverberate inside of him. Hendery drinks a second glass of the LiquidHeaven as he peers through gaps in curtains draped up over concealed entrances that lead into other, smaller, rooms.

Hendery has a fair idea of what happens behind curtains like these, and it makes him feel uneasy, like he's stumbled into the darker side of the Halos that he had almost forgotten existed. He feels stupid, but he’d almost forgotten that paying for sex was part and parcel of this place. He remembers the neon sign: the naked woman, flashing bright red, and he hesitates, unsure if he wants to explore further, except now the corridors look like a maze and he can't remember from which way he's come, so he continues forward through the corridors, the music getting quieter as he takes a right, and then louder again.

Good, he thinks, he’s going in the right direction. But then he realises the music sounds like it’s further away again, and it’s so confusing that he feels jittery.

He’s lost.

 

 

 

 

 

There’s a burst of high-pitched laughter from behind a door on his left as he passes by. He continues on, closing his eyes and trying to feel the bass of the music again, to use it like a compass in the depth of space, as he walks. A figure comes into view along the corridor, watching him as he hesitates, and Hendery recognises that it’s the guy from the podium, the one riding the machine with distractingly fluid movements.

"Are you lost?" he asks as Hendery gets closer to him. “You’re far away from the main club.”

"Im not lost,” Hendery lies. “I’m just…I’m exploring the place. Looking around.”

“I think you’re lost.” The guy looks a little concerned, a little amused. “What’s your name?”

“Hendery, why?” He immediately regrets giving his real name. Even If it’s not the one on his birth document, it’s what everyone calls him on the station (except for his father, who will only communicate in full names and stern silences). He hopes that behind the pretty face isn’t a Control spy, just waiting to report back to his family about what dumb shit he’s getting up to when he is meant to be studying.

Hendery starts to think the LiquidHeaven might be making him a little paranoid.

"I'm Xiaojun,” the guy says. He leans against the wall, his shirt riding up a little and revealing a tiny strip of bronzed skin. “Are you interested in paying for something private tonight, Hendery?"

Hendery jolts his head back up to meet Xiaojun’s eyes. So that _is_ what people come back here for, he’d thought as much - from the stories he’s heard about the Halos, the hedonistic activities available to bored Galaxy-tourists aren’t limited to drinking moonshine & dancing to old music, and it’s pretty damn clear to him now that the winding corridors and velvet curtains are the entranceway to a rabbit hole he had no intention of entering tonight. Not that he’s a stranger to sex. It’s just... This is different.

"I can’t find my friends,” he says.

"Is that yes or no?” Xiaojun doesn’t seem to be being arrogant, more genuinely unsure of his intentions, and Hendery is intrigued as to how he ended up here, working in a semi-illegal halo nightclub. He hopes it was by choice, but something about this place suggests it probably wasn’t.

"No. I’m not here for— uh _that_."

"That’s okay." Xiaojun smiles then. He has a smile like lightning - it’s quick and it’s bright and it lights him up. Hendery’s been called handsome a hundred times over, and he knows that his parent's genes were kind to him, but, well, Xiaojun is on a whole new level of attractive. His gaze is soft as he says, “I guess I should go and find someone with money to burn. The club is back the way you’ve come. Take two left turns, then a right, and then you follow the corridor until you’re there. Don’t get lost again, it gets dangerous out here.”

He turns to walk away and his shirt sleeves fall over his hands like the shirt wasn’t made to fit him. It looks good regardless.

"Wait, don't just go!” Hendery scrambles for words. He can’t remember how many turns Xiaojun just told him to take and he doesn’t want to be left alone. “I, uh, I saw you out there tonight. You ride that thing..."

Xiaojun turns back. "The rodeo bull,” he says.

"The bull, yeah.” Hendery nods. He’s nodding a lot, maybe too much, he thinks, but to his delight Xiaojun steps towards him, willing to hear him out. He continues, “How do you stay on it? How come you don't fall off? It’s really cool.”

Xiaojun smiles at him and it’s just as pretty seeing it a second time around. "How do I stay on? Practise and skill, in that order,” he says. He looks pleased and it occurs to Hendery that maybe he isn’t used to being asked about himself, maybe people don’t usually care about what he has to say. Xiaojun nods towards the drink in Hendery’s hand. “What's that?"

"LiquidHeaven." Hendery holds it out. “Do you want it?”

Xiaojun pulls a face and shakes his head. "That stuff is strong, I hope you've drank it before."

"Not before tonight. Tonight though, this is my third glass. S’good stuff." He smiles and holds the glass to eye level. “And you get used to the bitter taste after a while!”

"Oh boy." Xiaojun looks at the glass, then up at Hendery, and then he holds out his hand. "Come with me, you need water."

Hendery takes his hand because he doesn’t know what else to do, and maybe because he’s intrigued as to what will happen if he does. He can’t remember how to get back to the club and he has no idea what he’ll do when he gets back there and still can’t find Lucas or Yangyang anyway. So he follows Xiaojun, shirt cuffs billowing over his hand as he pulls Hendery with him, along the corridor and into a small alcove of a room which is covered by a pink velvet curtain that drapes in perfect ripples across the door.

“Nice curtain,” he says, and then he feels dumb for it, but Xiaojun says, “Oh, thank you,” in return anyway. Behind the curtain is a dark room, the centrepiece of which is a long chair with carved wooden feet and a pillowed backrest, that stretches along the wall to his right. It doesn’t look like it was made on the stations, so Hendery guesses that it must be a vintage piece, or a replica at least, from Earth. There are velvet throws folded at the foot of it and it actually looks quite comfortable, Hendery thinks, though he guesses comfort isn’t the main priority for most of the guests who use this room.

“Sit down on the chaise lounge,” Xiaojun tells him and let’s go of Hendery’s hand, leaving him to sit down.

Hendery does as he’s told and watches as Xiaojun bends down to open the door of an ornate chest set against the joining wall. On top of it is a small lamp with a jewelled shade and it’s the light from this that lights the space. It’s pretty and kind of dreamlike in here, like something from an old Earth movie, the type that were made in his great, great, great grandparents time.

“Is there where you, uh, entertain?” Hendery asks as Xiaojun takes two glasses and a decanter out of one of the cupboards and places them on top of the counter.

Xiaojun doesn’t look up from what he’s doing, but he nods. “Usually I’m only allowed paying customers back here, so if anyone comes in I will tell them you’ve paid for an hour.” He pours out two glasses from the decanter and looks up at Hendery with a terse stare. “Understood?”

“Paid for an hour of what?” Hendery frowns. Between the decor and the intense way in which Hendery watches him, he’s getting confused all over again, but that’s okay, this is what he’s here for - to experience life outside of the walls of the station, to be young and free and stupid. It’s coming pretty easily so far.

“Whatever you wanted to do to me.” Xiaojun hands Hendery a glass flute of water and takes the glass of LiquidHeaven away from him. “Here, drink this instead.” He sits down next to him and watches as Hendery brings the flute to his lips.

He has eyes like the deepest of waters, Hendery decides. They’re mesmerising, dragging him under a current that he barely feels like swimming against. Hendery stares into them, sees himself in them: two tiny mirrors of himself. Hendery drinks the water, and Xiaojun’s eyes drink him in, and neither of them move, until Xiaojun shifts closer to him and places one, blouse-cuff covered hand, gently onto Hendery’s knee.

“You have nice eyes,” Hendery says, taking a drink. He licks his lips. He feels thirsty, except he’s just drank half a glass of water and his throat is wet and his lips are soft, and he shouldn’t feel thirsty at all. Maybe he isn’t thirsty, maybe he’s just confused. Maybe he just wants to dive into Xiaojun’s eyes. Either way, he can’t stop staring.

“Try not to fall in love with me, you’ve only known me for five minutes.” Xiaojun laughs softly. It’s a joke, but Hendery can see how men could fall for the courtesan in a heartbeat. He’s so beautiful it’s haunting.

“I’d never,” he says. “But thank you for the drink.” It comes out in a weird sort of whisper that doesn’t sound like his voice.

“You’re welcome,” Xiaojun replies, his voice equally as soft. It’s a pleasant sound, almost like the relaxing tune of a music box and it makes Hendery want to close his eyes and sink further into the chair. He doesn’t close his eyes though, because Xiaojun is right there, his face open and his gaze expectant.

Hendery watches Xiaojun as he watches back, and it’s almost like looking into a mirror. When he blinks, Xiaojun blinks. When he breathes in, Xiaojun breathes in, everything in sync except for Hendery’s hand clasped tight around the glass he’s holding, and Xiaojun’s hand on his thigh, higher now, up near his waist. Hendery’s skin is hot.

Finally, Hendery clears his throat. “Do you like working here?” He asks. Xiaojun doesn’t answer him, his pupils wide and gaze piercing, he just stares at him, pulling him in, and maybe on another man this would be too much, but Hendery’s always been up for a challenge, so he’s determined to keep up with the strange creature who is sliding halfway into his lap. He stares and Xiaojun stares back, and Hendery forgets to breathe for a while.

“I like riding the bull,” Xiaojun tells him, with purpose. It isn’t the question Hendery was asking, and that says a lot. “I didn’t like it at first, actually, felt stupid and awkward. But now it’s like second nature, like breathing or blinking, and I can see the beauty in it now.”

“It’s— yeah, I can see that." Hendery nods. "You ride it pretty well."

"Pretty well? Do you think you could do as well as me?"

"With practice, maybe I could." Hendery sits up a little straighter, a little taller, so he's eye to eye with Xiaojun. Xiaojun isn't as tall as he is, he could tell when he led him into the private room, but now, sitting here with Xiaojun straddling him on the chaise lounge (and Hendery can barely pronounce chaise lounge, let alone comprehend it’s design), Hendery feels small underneath the power of Xiaojun's gaze and he desperately wants to regain some control. It’s in his nature, his father says. "Maybe I'd be better at it than you are,” he adds, tongue in cheek and watches as Xiaojun’s eyes widen.

Hendery feels good that he’s regained some balance again.

Xiaojun looks away, pressing a hand to his flushed cheek, and laughs softly, a quiet sound that makes Hendery think that Xiaojun really didn't want to find him funny. It also makes him glad that he did. "You didn't even know what it was called until I told you."

"So what?" Hendery smiles back at him too. He can’t manage _not_ to - his smile is infectious. "I’m a determined kind of person."

When Xiaojun kisses him, it feels like a prize, like he’s done something right and this is the galaxy’s reward to him. It’s soft and tentative, and Xiaojun’s fingers are slow and measured as they brush over his shoulders and meet behind his neck. It tickles. “Are you going to strangle me?”

“No. You haven’t paid for it." Xiaojun smiles at him playfully. "You haven't paid at all."

Hendery grins. This is so much fun, he's having so much fun, he can hardly remember how he ended up here. Maybe escaping the station was the best idea _ever_. “People pay you for that?” He isn’t one to judge, it’s more that he is intrigued at the thought, and he holds back a giggle - nervous, excited. Xiaojun's thumbs press softly at the round of his adam's apple.

"It's not unusual," he says. He moves his hands, then, down over Hendery's shoulders and to his chest, where he presses them flat against his shirt. “Some men like it.”

It's making Hendery feel dizzy. It's making him want more. A tight heat stirs his lower belly and he wonders if this is what it feels like to be set free into deep space, tethered by nothing and no one. Xiaojun kisses the side of his face - once, twice, like a whisper against his skin.

"I heard that the Halos were wild places, but, damn..." Hendery murmurs, mind all over the place, speaking so he doesn't accidentally groan instead.

Xiaojun stops still. “The Halos aren’t wild.” He speaks solemnly, his mouth so near Hendery's ear he can feel Xiaojun’s breath. “They’re _dangerous,_  you need to know that," he says, and then he kisses Hendery on the mouth again, like he’s trying to kiss some sense into him.

Hendery isn't sure what is happening exactly and how he ended up here behind a velvet curtain with Xiaojun grinding against him. He remembers being lost, and then being found, but now he's lost again and it's all so confusing, but it's so _good_ . His father would disown him if he could see him now, Hendery thinks, but in the moment he doesn't care one bit because his tongue is in a pretty boy's mouth and there are hands in his hair, hands on his waist, under his shirt, and  _everywhere._

Hendery has no idea how long they make-out for, because time feels insignificant here and now, but when Xiaojun sits back, breathless, flushed, shy, Hendery wishes there were a way to stop time and stay here. He doesn’t get time to imagine it though, because Xiaojun gets up then, pushing his hair back out of his face and says, “Turn left at the end of the corridor, you’ll find your way back to the club if you listen out for the music.”

“What?” Hendery looks at him. His heartbeat is racing, his lips still tingle. His skin, his brain, _everything_ is burning. “What?”

“You shouldn’t be here, I shouldn’t have brought you here.” Xiaojun points towards the curtain. “You should go,” he says. “Just–– just be careful."

Hendery takes too many wrong turns to count, and he ends up leaving through a side door he never noticed and as he stumbles out and into the street, the smoke making him cough, he has to lean back against the wall to collect his thoughts, but it’s too difficult to think of anything but Xiaojun.

 

 

 

 

Hendery realises that his VokalLink is no longer sitting just inside his ear pretty quickly.

He turns to go back into the club, but the door he entered through earlier is closed, locked up with a rusting lock that looks as though it’s been there for years.

Something feels off, and Hendery is starting to wonder if coming here might be something he’ll come to regret once he figures out exactly what has gone wrong.

He pats down his jacket just in case he’s taken it out without remembering, but there’s nothing in either of his pockets. Except, _shit_ , that isn’t right either, because his VideoLink device should be there even if his earpiece isn’t, but his pockets are definitely empty and he’s almost certain he never dropped it - it’s the newest model, the type that is meant to bounce straight back to the hand if it hits the floor, and, anyway he’d _know_ if it had fallen out.

Hendery looks back at the locked door, the neon signs above it unlit, and then he looks back down the empty street, and suddenly he feels very alone. He doesn’t even know what time it is, he doesn’t know where Lucas or Yangyang are. All he knows is that he’s drank too much, he’s lost his Links to civilisation, and he’s met possibly the hottest Halo-ite in the entire galaxy, who crawled into his lap, kissed him and put his hands all over his—

 _Oh._  

Hendery slowly slips his hand inside his jacket and into the hidden pocket that sits just inside it, and even before he feels the cold silk against his fingers he knows that it will be empty. Hendery curses as he feels for the money that is no longer there. He feels nauseous. He has no devices and no cash to bribe his way into the cargo ship home. It’s lucky his identification chip is imbedded into his thumb otherwise he’d have nothing to link him to the station at all, aside from the damn jacket on his back.

He wonders why Xiaojun didn’t just go the whole way and steal that too, since he’s taken everything else, and he’s angry and he’s hurt - his pride the most, but another part of him too, the part that just ten minutes ago was enthralled with the deepest of eyes and the softest of laughs that, he realises, belong to a thief.

He starts to walk back towards the port. The return ship isn’t due to dock for at least another hour, but there’s nothing else he can do but go there and hope - pray, even - that he can talk his way back onto the ship if his friends don’t turn up on time.

 

 

 

 

 

“Where the hell have you been?” Lucas appears out of nowhere and grapples him, rough and boisterous, from the side. “We couldn’t find you! We tried asking people, and then we left the club, but you disappeared.”

Yangyang says, “Poof! Gone just like that.” He’s drunk.

“I got distracted.” Hendery shrugs. He waves at Yangyang, who is following behind, and thanks all of the stars in the galaxy that his friends haven’t left him behind.

“We’ve been playing poker with a street-gang!” Lucas brandishes a thick wad of cash and fans it out in his hand with a grin. “And I’m actually good at it!”

Yangyang takes Hendery’s arm and walks with him, as Lucas showers them with notes, which he then has to stop to pick up while Yangyang laughs. “One of them sat me on her knee and let me help her play her round. She said I reminded her of her grandson.” He laughs. “She was cooler than my grandmother, _way_ cooler.”

“What did you get up to?” Lucas asks, money shoved into his pockets, sleeves rolled up to his elbows. He is positively _beaming_ and Hendery is glad they had fun.

“Oh, you know, nothing really.” Hendery picks up a stray note that flutters to the floor beside them. “Tell me more about this poker game.”

They laugh as Yangyang describes the table of snake-tattooed women with their fierce looks and sharp wit as they wander slowly through the streets back towards the port, and when the cargo ship docks and they step on board, Hendery doesn’t look back.

 

 

 

 

 

Hendery tells his mother that his VideoLink fell during a cadet training mission, and she fusses a little in a monotone voice that takes any emotion away from her words. She tells him to be careful and not to scuff his boots anymore, but there’s a brand new version nine device in a box on his bed before he goes to sleep.

His replacement VokalLink he purchases with his own savings, he doesn’t want to arouse too much suspicion, and it’s the same version as his last: the sleek, slim model in silicone, that plays clear and crisp voice messages directly into his right ear.

He thinks about Xiaojun more than he would like to. He thinks about the way that Xiaojun led him behind the curtained doorway and sobered him up enough so that he didn’t get sick. He thinks about the way that Xiaojun’s smile makes him feel (dizzy and out of breath, and angry about it too) and the way he had kissed him with such purpose. He guesses now that his purpose was solely to distract him enough to rob him blind.

But Hendery also thinks about the fact that he was _able_ to be distracted. He’s always thought of himself as pretty switched on, but in barely ten minutes Xiaojun had distracted him with attention - attention that he’s spent his live craving. Xiaojun distracted him, stole from him and did it all while looking like sin’s angelic cousin. It’s not _fair_.

Hendery’s blood boils with annoyance and confusion, and with something else too. He dreams about Xiaojun most nights now. Sometimes it’s him, Hendery is sure of it, and sometimes he’s a faceless figure: a shape in a doorway, a shadow behind him, but everytime he wakes up it’s to the taste of Xiaojun’s generic fruit flavoured lipbalm and the aching feeling of frustration. Mainly, Hendery realises, as he unties his laces and kicks his regulation boots underneath his bed after  long day of training with the Elite Retention team, he wants to know why.

No, he _needs_ to know why.

Why did Xiaojun rob him? Why did Xiaojun kiss him? _Why does it even matter?_ The questions swim round and round his brain all night, and then the next night, and the one after that. He gets no answers from sleep.

Hendery ignores his friend’s video messages the next Friday; he doesn’t feel like hanging out. He  turns off his Links and curls up onto his side on his bed, staring at his Window, which isn’t turned on to any mode - it's just a blank screen, black as deep space, and it shows his reflection in it in monochrome. When he blinks, exhausted and wound up, he can almost see Xiaojun smiling back at him in the glass screen.

Hendery huffs angrily and turns over to face the plain wall on the other side of the room. He _has_ to confront him, Hendery decides, lying there on his own in the dark. He has to go back, and he won’t rest until he does.

 

 

 

 

 

He takes another cargo ship ride back to Halo V thirteen days later. He gets the tip-off from a girl named Yeri who is top in his intergalactic engineering classes, whose second cousin, he learns, makes side money in stashing stowaways aboard and dropping them at the Halos during his runs between Earth and Sector Three, which is just to the North-West of Halo’s V and X.

Yeri explains, with a mischievous grin, that her parents don’t speak of their extended family. “God forbid anyone finds out we are related to low level criminals.” She cackles. “It’s fucking hilarious, how cagey my family are about it.”

“Right.” Hendery pauses. “But your cousin’s, uh, discreet about the people he lets on board?”

“Why? Who you going to see?” Yeri asks him with curiosity. There’s engine fuel on her fingers.  

“Me? No, I’m just asking about it for a friend,” he lies.

She smirks, but to her credit, she doesn’t say anything other than, “I’ll slip you my cousin’s details this week as long as you’ll let me do all the work on this project. You’re not concentrating on it properly and I’m a damn good engineer. I’m going to acethis module”

Hendery thinks this is a fair deal.

 He keeps his head down as he steps on board the ship two days later. He slips the pilot the required payment and sits down by himself at the back of the hold, next to a young woman with a sleeping baby at her breast. The baby stares at him with wide eyes until he gives it a tiny wave, and then it gurgles happily. As they ride towards the Halos, the crew make shout-outs to determine where they’ll stop. There are a couple of ship-workers who talk loudly, in crude sentences, about how they’re looking for a fuck after a long time in deep space, so it’s agreed that Halo V will be the first place they dock.

“That’s where they send the best whores to work, and they train up their kid’s too,” one of them laughs. It’s a deep and unpleasant sound, and Hendery accidentally on purpose kicks one of them in the shin as they disembark the ship at Halo V’s port, but, infuriatingly, the man doesn’t even seem to notice it.

Without Yangyang and Lucas and the naive excitement they’d all shared two weeks before, the grimy, smoky streets don’t seem as full of promise anymore, and Hendery realises that he’s truly alone - alone in a place he doesn’t know, with an aim he can’t quite be sure of. He doesn’t even know if Xiaojun will be at the club. He doesn’t really know anything at all, and maybe this was the most terrible idea of his short life, but it’s too late to turn back now - there isn’t a ship stopping here until the morning - so he continues through the streets, pushing through crowds of people until he spots the three neon signs that represent the hedonistic world beyond the doorman.

He hands in the cash that Lucas dropped the last time they walked these streets, and whatever it is pleases the doorman, who stands aside with little more than a glance at his face.

Inside, the club is much the same as he remembers: hot, over-crowded and loud. The music, he has to admit, is good. He looks around the room, checks the podiums for any sign of Xiaojun, but they’re all occupied by contortionists and dancers in tight silver costumes. The bass from the speakers thumps loudly around him.

Hendery watches the performers and wonders whether they’re skilled in other things, like Xiaojun is, too. He stands at the edge of the room and tries not to make eye-contact with too many people. Being here sober is a strange sort of feeling - his eyes are tired and his shoulders feel knotted, and he’s come all this damn way for nothing, because Xiaojun isn’t even here.

Until he is.

When Hendery taps him on the shoulder, he doesn’t even turn around at first. “I’m not free right now, honey, but maybe after you can take me somewhere quieter,” Xiaojun says, as if it’s a well rehearsed line. When he does turn to face Hendery, thought, he does a double take, eyes darting nervously between his face and the exit door. “It’s you.”

Hendery says, “Yeah. I have questions.”

Xiaojun glances towards the podium. “I have work.”

Hendery stares him down, and Xiaojun blinks, looking away. Hendery feels a dash of smugness, like he has the upper hand, except he knows full well that he doesn’t, because it’s _Xiaojun_ with the answers, and it’s Xiaojun with control and it’s Xiaojun who has his belongings too.

“Fifteen minutes,” Xiaojun says. “Give me fifteen minutes and then we can talk, if that’s what you want.”

Hendery nods. “Where should I wait for you?”

“Can you remember where my room is?” Xiaojun asks him. “Where I took you?”

Hendery falters. He doesn’t remember, there were too many corridors and too many turns and he can’t even be sure how he got outside last time. “No.”

Xiaojun smiles. “Of course you don’t.” He shakes his head as if it’s incredibly dumb of Hendery to not know his way around the stupid fucking maze of corridors and curtains behind the club. “Just stay here.”

Hendery gets a drink while he waits. It’s only a short - it’s something called Angel Juice that the bartender recommends to him when he tells them the drink is for someone who doesn’t want to get too drunk. “Not me,” he lies. “I can handle _four_ glasses of LiquidHeaven.”

Whether the bartender believes his bullshit or not, Hendery doesn’t know. Xiaojun certainly wouldn’t believe him, and the thought of it pisses him off. As Hendery sips his drink (which tastes of passionfruit and burnt sugar or, at least it tastes of the modified versions served up on the station) he wonders just what he’s doing here and whether he’ll get the conclusion he wants.

It would help if he _knew_ what he wanted, of course, but Hendery still isn’t certain which of his questions he wants an answer to the most and whether getting them will even conclude anything at all.

When Xiaojun finishes his show, he barely glances at Hendery. He throws him only the most subtle of nods and then he weaves his way out of the club floor and disappears into the darkness of the corridor. Hendery leaves his glass on the nearest table and follows him. He tries to memorise the way he’s being led - how many turns and how long it takes - but he’s distracted by the way that Xiaojun keeps turning back to check he’s there, the flash of his eyes in the darkness.

He has nice eyes and Hendery’s annoyed about it.

Hendery recognises the deep pink curtain that Xiaojun slips behind and then holds open for him, and then the chaise lounge and the ornate dresser, his previous visit coming back to him in memories that, annoyingly, stir arousal in his low belly. He doesn’t sit down.

“Where’s my stuff, then? That you stole from me?” he asks, and he half expects Xiaojun to deny all knowledge of his stolen goods, to laugh in his face and call him crazy, but instead Xiaojun just shrugs. 

“I have no idea where it is, any of it,” he says.

“Did you sell it?” Hendery questions. “Did you keep it? Did you plan to rob me? Where have you put my stuff?”

“Do you think that I get to decide what to do with anything we take? Do you think I have any choices?” Xiaojun laughs softly, as is the mere thought is completely absurd. “I’m just trying to pay my way out of here, and I’m failing at it.”

“Then– I don’t understand.” Hendery frowns.

Xiaojun leans against the dresser. “I wiped it, before I gave it to management. I wiped all of your data, don’t worry. Whoever has it now won’t know whose it was, no one will find out you were here. That’s what you’re worried about, right?”  He’s judging him, Hendery can see it on his face. He’s judging and he’s _right_ to, because Hendery has been worried about being found out; if only because his parents will never let him out of their sight again, and then how can he piss around and disappoint them even more if he’s chained to his father’s side?

“No.” Hendery crosses his arms. “I mean, yes, but… Look, you need to tell me why you did it, why you stole them.”

“I don’t _need_ to tell you anything.” Xiaojun sighs so quietly that Hendery can barely hear. “I did it because it was easy, because you didn’t listen to any of my warnings about this place. You still haven’t, considering you’ve come back. Plus, your VideoLink was practically brand new, I saw it in the corridor and… And I couldn’t pass up the opportunity. I guessed you wouldn’t miss them, and I’m right, aren’t I?”

He has Hendery’s new VideoLink in his hands a split second later, taken right out of his pocket before Hendery has time to even blink. “You have a version nine now, woah,” he murmurs. “Oh damn, this is worth even more than the last one.”

Hendery can barely breathe. “Shit, are you-- are you robbing me _again_?”

Xiaojun hands his VideoLink back. “No, I was just curious. Sit down, I’ll make us a drink,” he says. "Are you sober? Can you handle a moonshine, or do I need to pour you a water?"

Hendery scoffs, jutting out his chin. He narrows his eyes. "I can handle any moonshine, and I can handle you."

"Are you trying to fight me or trying to flirt with me?" Xiaojun rearranges the curtain over the door, making sure the gap is completely covered.

This isn’t going how Hendery imagined it. He’d imagined this confrontation would feel empowering and satisfying. Instead it feels like he’s spiralling out of control, like he’s spinning through deep space and he can’t breathe.

He scowls. “What does it matter? You don’t _like_ me.”

Xiaojun looks down and bites his lip. He's smiling, eyes glimmering with something Hendery can't put his finger on. Hendery wonders if he’s glad he came back. He hopes so, and it’s messed up, because he’s glad too even though he’s being made to feel a damn fool under Xiaojun’s sleight of hand and jet-black gaze. “You can’t be sure of that,” Xiaojun tells him. "I might kiss you again. What will you do in that case?"

Hendery grits his teeth. "I’ll check my pockets before I leave this time," he says, and it isn’t meant to be funny, but Xiaojun laughs.

"I really can't believe you had the nerve to come back here," he says. "I didn't think I'd see you again."

"Yeah? Well, you don’t know me. I'm a very determined person." Hendery’s frustrated. He wants Xiaojun to take him seriously, he wants to win the argument that they don’t even seem to be having. What is he doing here? He takes Xiaojun by the wrist, and Xiaojun looks down with-- well, it’s not surprise exactly, it’s a lot more like admiration. “Please… _Please_ just answer me this properly.”

Xiaojun tilts his head to the side. “Go on then, what’s the big question?”

Hendery takes a breath. “Did you only kiss me to steal my stuff?" he asks, and he wants the words to sound stern, he wants to sound pissed off, but he sounds breathless, nervous - like he’s anticipating something.

Xiaojun’s pulsepoint beats underneath his fingers, the skin of his wrist soft and warm. "I don't know.”

This time Hendery kisses him first, and maybe this isn’t how he envisioned this going exactly - feeling desperate and powerless against some tiny thief on a hub-station no one knows he’s on - but it feels so right that he wonders, afterwards, if he really wanted answers at all and didn’t just want to feel Xiaojun’s lips on his again and again.

“If you knew what was good for you, you wouldn’t visit the Halos, not ever,” Xiaojun says as he pushes him out of the doorway an hour later, loud footsteps approaching along the next corridor,

but Hendery has never done the things recommended of him and he doesn’t intend to start now.

Hendery’s heart beats in his ears for what feels like hours afterwards, and he leans against the wall of the corridor, catching his breath as people pass by. They pay him no attention, and he feels a little annoyed at the fact that he apparently blends in just fine with the real clientele of this part of the club. Once he’s caught his breath, Hendery goes to leave, but he second guesses whether he should turn left or right at the end of the corridor and he doesn’t want to end up completely lost, not again, so he takes a breath and turns back around.

“Hey,” Hendery pulls the pink curtain back, just a little. He sees a flash of pale skin and realises it’s Xiaojun’s shoulder; a dark royal blue robe low over his shoulders. He’s changing. “Oh, sorry,” Hendery mumbles, dropping the curtain and letting it fall back over the door.

“Why are you still here?” Xiaojun whispers through the curtain, urgent and confused. “You should go. I have a client coming.”

“I– Can you remind me how to get back to the exit?”

Xiaojun pulls back the curtain. The silk robe he’s wearing is tightly belted at the waist and it complements his petite figure perfectly. Hendery doesn’t want to think about whoever is going to get to take it off. Xiaojun rolls his eyes and tells him, “It’s back the way we came! You need to remember the way this time.”

Hendery considers this. “Why?” he asks. “I thought I wasn’t to be coming back here?”

 Xiaojun smiles at him. “And yet, you’re back already.” Xiaojun steps outside of the curtain, closing it behind him. He puts out his hand for Hendery to take and smiles at him softly - not mocking, not annoyed, just kind. Hendery isn’t used to kindness. “It’s this way,” Xiaojun tells him, and leads the way, his robe swishing around his knees as he walks.

 

 

 

 

 

When Hendery visits Halo V the third time, he slips through into the back-corridor and follows his way to Xiaojun by pure instinct alone.

“It’s not instinct, it’s muscle memory,” Xiaojun corrects him. “You’ve walked the corridor four times now, you’ve just learnt the route.”

“Whatever.” Hendery stares as Xiaojun stretches out, kitten like, along the length of the chaise lounge.“You don’t seem… You’re not surprised I came back? You said that I shouldn’t.”

“I’m surprised you haven’t got your, um…” He waves his hand in the air. “Your closure already.”

“Closure?”

“Isn’t that why you came back last time? To get answers, to show that I didn’t get one over on you?” Xiaojun sits up and leans forward, watching Hendery hover by the curtain. He rests his chin on his hand, his hair falling over his eye in a way that makes him look soft and kind of vulnerable. “I thought you’d come back to kiss me and leave. It would serve me right if I liked you, wouldn’t it? For what I did when we met.”

“That’s not why I kissed you,” Hendery says. “Sure, I wanted answers. And I wanted to… I wanted to stop thinking about it all of the time, but then, when I was here, I realised that it wasn’t that simple.”

“Things rarely are,” Xiaojun says. “You’re certainly making my life more complicated.”

“Am I? Why?” Hendery isn’t sure that Xiaojun has the right to say that— _he_ was minding his own business on the night they met. He was just drunk and lost and alone, and then he wasn’t alone but he was still lost, always lost.

“Because I like you, despite it all.” Xiaojun is still sitting, small and vulnerable looking in the oversized top that falls away from his shoulder. “And I think you like me too.”

Hendery says, “Me? I just like trouble,” and Xiaojun laughs in that shy way Hendery can’t resist.

 

 

 

 

 

The next time Hendery gets a chance to sneak out and visit the Halo, Xiaojun has candles burning along the top of the cabinet. They’re real candles, real flames, flickering despite the fact there is no breeze here. Hendery marvels at this - at the way the flame can feel things he can’t.

Candles aren’t allowed on the space station because they’re too dangerous, according to Control. “I think it’s because they can control all of the electricity. They could keep us all in the dark if they ever wanted to, we wouldn’t have any other light sources.” He holds his finger over the naked flame, the heat searing into his skin as if he’s touching Xiaojun.

“I couldn’t live without candles. Isn’t the smell of the burning flame lovely?” Xiaojun takes a small leather bound notebook from behind the cushion. There is a fountain pen sticking out of the bind. “Hmm, how did you get here?”

“What’s it for? Is it a logbook of clients?” Hendery asks. Maybe it's a bit forward of him, but since he’s pretending to be paying customer right now, Hendery guesses he can bring it up.

Xiaojun shakes his head. “No, no that’s all done by management. I just like to write during my downtime. Like, now. _Now_ I’d usually be writing poetry or lyrics or stories about far away parts of the galaxy. But here you are, distracting me.” He raises an eyebrow. “Oh! Let me write a few lines about you…”

He sits up then, his legs curled up underneath him and opens the notebook, tapping the pen against the page as he studies Hendery carefully. “Sit down,” he says, and Hendery moves the jacket he discarded only five minutes ago and sits down next to him.

He feels a bubble of nervous laughter rising through his chest and presses his hand to his mouth and grins against it. “Sorry, sorry, I’ll be serious too,” he says, but he can’t help but laugh at the sudden seriousness

Xiaojun looks down and starts to write, his brow creased with concentration. He looks up every so often, tilts his head and watches Hendery through long, dark eyelashes. Hendery looks around the room as Xiaojun ponders over words.

After a while, when he’s getting restless, Hendery asks, “What are you writing about me?” and tries to lean over to see the pages of the notebook, but Xiaojun lifts it up against his chest and shakes his head.

“Be patient,” he says, eyes still on the page. Hendery pouts, he doesn’t want to be patient, he’s never been the patient type. He’s the type to act first, think later. That’s how he met Yangyang and Lucas, they’re all one and the same. “It’s a virtue.”

Hendery pouts at him. “I’m _trying_ to be patient.”

“And stop staring at me while I write!”

“I can’t.” He’s restless. He’s excited. He came back and Xiaojun doesn’t _mind_. And now they’re lounging on a velvet sofa, Xiaojun sucking on the end of the pen he’s holding in a way that’s so fucking obscene it shouldn’t be allowed. This is what is like, Hendery thinks, to be tortured. It feels amazing. “I can’t stop staring.”

Xiaojun makes a noise that sounds like a frustrated purr and covers his face with his notebook.

“Did you want to do something else with me?” He asks when he’s come to terms with the staring, and puts the notebook down on the seat next to them.

Hendery allows a flicker of a smile to grace his lips as he nods.

Xiaojun’s touch is like a hot flame and Hendery likes the burn, wants him seared into his skin, there forever. Time passes too quickly, and before it can become anything more, Xiaojun is called back to take his turn in the main club by the ringing of a bell above his doorway.

Xiaojun sighs, closing his notebook and sliding it underneath the cushion behind him. “It’s my turn to work the podium again, I only have ten minutes to get there or I’ll be in trouble.”

“Can’t you say you didn’t hear it?” Hendery asks. “Do you have to go?”

The ghost of a smile appears on Xiaojun’s kiss-bitten lips. “It would be out of character for me to skip out on my duties…” He stands up and adjusts the collar on his blouse, smoothing it down carefully “Unless I have a client booked, I don’t usually have any reason not to go.”

Hendery thinks about this. Says, “I wish I could be a legitimate reason for you not to."

“We'd be legitimately in _trouble_ , if they knew I had you in here when I'm meant to be working for them. Anyway, I’ll think of you when I’m up there riding the rodeo machine.” Xiaojun applies a gloss to his lips which stains them red, watching his reflection in a hand-mirror he takes from the top drawer of the chest next to where Hendery sits. He’s never watched anyone apply makeup before, but it’s kind of beautiful, a curious sort of art. “And I’ll try not to laugh at the thought that you told me you could do it better.”

“Yeah...That might have been a little hasty.”

Xiaojun shrugs as he puts down the mirror. “I don’t know,” he says, with a crimson smile. “I think that you probably have the hips for it.”

Hendery thinks about this for the next week, every single day. He daydreams during training and almost over-loads a cargo ship with four extra crates he missed counting during Resource-Transportation, and it takes him twice as long to get ready to accompany his mother to breakfast with his grandmother the next Sunday, because he’s busy spacing out and thinking about the pure concentration on Xiaojun’s face when he closes his eyes and lets the movement  of his own hips take over.

His grandmother’s apartment on the South-East of the station has always been cold and formal. Hendery always used to think this was in part because of her insistence to decorate it with fussy, ornate furniture. But now that he’s spent time in Xiaojun’s room at the club, with its ostentatious chaise lounge and velvet curtain, he realises that the warmth of a place has a lot more to do with the feel of the person who resides there. His grandmother is cold and she’s disinterested in  everything he has to say (which isn’t much because neither her nor his mother seem to care for his opinion) and that makes his skin prickle with goosebumps as he sits quietly at his mother’s side.

It says a lot, Hendery thinks, that he feels more geniality, more hospitality, from someone who robbed him the first time they met than he has ever felt from his flesh and blood.

 

 

 

 

 

Hendery goes back, and he goes back again, and every time Xiaojun welcomes him with soft kisses and intrigued glances, and then tells him he shouldn’t come back.

“I won’t,” Hendery lies. Solemn faced, acting. “I don’t want to come back here, not ever. I don’t even _mean_ to come back here, I’ve actually been asking the pilots to stop at Halo Q, where I hear there's an awesome view of a particular cluster of stars from the old observation deck.”

“Bullshit." Xiaojun blows hair out of his eyes. "Q is just like V, which is just like X. There are clubs and there are velvet curtains just like this one. The halo hubs are all pretty similar now - a circle of rival gangs and rival markets that greet the same wide-eyed, neat haired tourists and serve them badly brewed moonshine and stories to tell their friends.”

“Oh, well I guess I’ll just come back here again, even if It’s deathly boring here." Hendery tries to smirk, but it just turns into a smile. "Yawn.”

“You can’t just _say_ yawn, that isn’t how it works.” Xiaojun scoffs. His eyes are shining, like they're laughing at him all on their own. Hendery wonders exactly what Xiaojun thinks of him sometimes. He wonders whether he'd actually care if Hendery didn't come back at all ,never to be seen again.  Would he even think of him? Hendery hopes so. He thinks about Xiaojun all the time, now.

“And you can’t just say ‘ _don’t come back here,_ " because you know I won't listen," he says.

“You listen when it suits you.” Xiaojun pushes Hendery’s jacket from his shoulders. “Here, take this off. And don’t let your VideoLink fall out of the pocket.”

Hendery does exactly as he’s told and - _oh boy_ \- is he glad for it.

"Do you ever think of me, when I haven't visited here for a while?" Hendery asks Xiaojun, arms around his waist, chin at his shoulder, after.

"Think of you?” Xiaojun breathes evenly, one, two, three breaths. Hendery feels like he’s at the airlock doors of a ship, waiting to be be pushed out. 

"Yeah."

"No," Xiaojun replies. “Never.”

 

 

 

 

 

There is an ornate carving on the side of the cabinet in Xiaojun’s private room that Hendery has never noticed before, but he notices it the next time he is at the club. It’s an intricate carving of vines of different sizes, some which are flowering, some which are not. The vines intertwine and overlap each other like they must still do in the wild forests back on Earth, and he wonders what it’s like down there. He thinks Xiaojun would look good under a forest canopy, surrounded by living, breathing things with a radiance to match his own.

He’s never really thought of places other than the stations before now, but since visiting Halo V, Hendery’s been wondering about all of the other parts of the galaxy too. His friend Ten is down there on Earth right now, working on Resource Reaping. He’s an Elite commander, leading a team of fifty men to reap the scarce amount of precious commodities left to bring back up.  Hendery wonders what it’s like.

Ten is three years older than he and Lucas, and Hendery thinks that if he were to tell anyone at all about his visits to the club, it would be him. He’d understand, Hendery thinks. Despite his rank, Ten has never looked down on anyone, and maybe, that’s why Hendery had such a crush on him growing up. Ten knew, of course he did, it was so obvious it might as well have been written on Hendery’s forehead. Hendery cringes when he thinks back, but Ten had always been kind: keeping the right amount of distance, reaching out when he knew Hendery was struggling. Hendery wants to thank him for that.

Maybe he will tell Ten about Xiaojun. Maybe he’ll connect when Ten’s next available on his VokalLink, Hendery thinks, because it’s difficult doing this - keeping such a momentous secret. But he shouldn’t tell Ten, just like he can’t tell Yangyang or Lucas, because it will put him in an awkward position, with yet another person’s secrets to keep, when Hendery is certain he must have his own. He hasn’t visited the station in six months and Yangyang says there’s only two things that keep people rooted elsewhere. One, he says, is love and the other is money, and Ten has never been interested in his status or the paycheck that goes with it.  

Hendery counts the freckles on Xiaojun’s back. “Have you told anyone that–– that I come and see you?”

“Not exactly.”  Xiaojun slips the tunic over his head. “But a few of us here, we look out for each other, so I wouldn’t be surprised if someone knew.”

“I haven’t told anyone either,” Hendery says. “I’ve thought about it, but I haven’t.”

“It’s for the best.” Xiaojun busies himself in front of the little mirror that tops the cabinet. “That way, when it ends, it can be just like it never happened at all.”

 

 

 

 

 

It’s Lucas who suggests their next group trip to Halo V, two months after their first. “Let’s go back!” He flips back against the cushions on his bed, where Yangyang is lying on his stomach watching VideoLink videos sent by some of their friends. He almost rolls off the bed when Lucas lands next to him and Hendery laughs as Yangyang scrambles to hold on to his VideoLink. “Careful, I don’t want to break mine like Hendery did,” he warns.

Lucas says, “Sorry! I’m just excited about the idea of winning at poker again!”

“It was fun. What do you say, H? Should we see if we can sneak a ride over there again?”

“Sure, I guess it might be fun.” Hendery tries to sound as indifferent about the idea as he can like he’s cool and collected and not constantly _dying_ inside thinking about Xiaojun’s soft smile and his wandering hands, and the fact that he thinks they’re going to end.

He doesn’t feel good about having to lie to his friends - about why he had to get new a VideoLink (because he dropped it while running to the shuttle to the North side of the station when he was late for a training class), about where he’s been when he’s been sneaking back to the Halos by himself (stories include accompanying his father to a meeting at Control headquarters and in bed sick with a neuro-flu virus), and about why he is so distracted all the damn time. But it’s for the best. His friends - as loveable and loyal as they are - might be the two least subtle people in the galaxy (he knows full and well that he’s the third). Plus, he’s thought more about it and he’s certain he can’t burden them with his secrets when they have their own lives to worry about, even if  all of their smiles and their laughter together might make it look to the outside world that they haven’t a care in the universe between them.

Hendery remembers Xiaojun’s shy gaze and the way his hands slid over his chest and towards the pocket with Hendery’s VideoLink in it the first night they met, and thinks about how oh so easy it is to distract people from the truth with a sleight of smile and the right words. So, he distracts his friends from the fact that the Cargo pilot recognises him from the last time he stepped aboard by himself as they board the ship from the port at midnight with a joke like a world-class con and only feels a little bad for it.

When they arrive at the port on Halo V, Lucas pushes himself into between Hendery and Yangyang and throws his arms around their shoulders so that they’re walking together in sync. “Should we find somewhere to play poker?”

Hendery pulls a face. “I’m not sure…”

“We could make some serious money,” Lucas says. “Well, we could if someone helps us win again.”

“Ah those ladies from the last game were so cool,” Yangyang adds.

Hendery doesn’t want to play poker. He’s gambling on enough as it is, and he can’t come here and not see Xiaojun, he just _can’t_. “I think we should go back to that club from last time,” he says. “To have some drinks. And maybe then we can find a poker game?”

“Sure, but how will we even find it? We stumbled across it by chance last time.” Yangyang is holding onto Lucas’ tightly as they walk. He’s fidgeting, drumming his fingers against his arm and Hendery thinks it’s nice, really, how excited his friends are to be back. “I wonder if it was down this alley or the next one…”

Hendery tries hard to falter as they reach the next side-alley, trying to maintain the illusion that he hasn’t become a regular in this part of the galaxy. “Uh, maybe it’s this way,” he says as they arrive at the correct street.

“Shit, you’re a genius!” Lucas sounds impressed as they round the corner and the three flashing signs come into view over the doorway to the left. “There’s the neon signs. The skull, the woman… This was the place!” 

Yangyang looks past Lucas and gives Hendery an inquisitive look. “How did you remember?”

“Muscle memory,” he says and Yangyang doesn’t argue with him, but he does give Lucas a glance that Hendery tries to not read too much into.

 

 

 

 

 

When they get inside the club, Hendery tries to look as though he isn’t searching for a certain face amongst the swarm of party-goers from all corners of the galaxy. “The bar is over this way,” Lucas tells him, and Hendery allows him to lead the way. He feels bad, again, for not telling his friends just how well he actually knows this place now, but, then, he thinks they would do the same for him, or they would try to.

Lucas probably couldn’t keep a secret that involved his dick, which isn’t a bad thing, it’s just– just a Lucas thing, really.

“You get some drinks, I’m just gonna go and…” He trails off, he can’t think of an excuse but it doesn’t seem to be important, because it’s too loud for Lucas to hear him anyway. Lucas shoots him the OK sign and he turns and makes his way through the crowd and towards the podium he last saw Xiaojun performing on.

It’s Xiaojun who spots him first. “It seems I can’t get rid of you,” he whispers into Hendery’s ear as he slips into his personal space with ease, but he looks happy about it at the same time.

Hendery hopes he isn’t blushing. _He_ wants to be the cool one, dammit. He always thought he’d be the cool one in this scenario, but things keep turning out differently to how he’d imagined. “How do you know I came to see you?” he asks.

“Wishful thinking.” Xiaojun smiles and grabs a glass of water from the bar. Maybe Hendery _is t_ he cool one after all, he thinks. Or maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe being cool was never important at all, not compared to what he feels right now.

“Your friends look fun, do they know who I am?” Xiaojun asks him. “Do they know it was me who stole your stuff?”

“No. They don’t know– they don’t even know anyone robbed me at all.” Hendery glances back towards the bar, where Yangyang is lining up shots of something radioactive looking along the bar. “They’re here because last time we all came here they loved it. _They_ had fun, they won poker games and ate street-food and almost got snake tattoos. They didn’t meet a sexy pickpocket.”

“I’m surprised, they look like easy targets.” Xiaojun smiles at him and Hendery laughs because they kind of _do_. He guesses he looked like that too when they first met - wide eyed and naive, a tourist in a world he doesn’t belong. He wonders if he still looks like that now.

They’re standing at the back wall of the main club, alongside one of the podiums. There is apair of boys wearing glitter and not much else dancing together on top of it. “Do you ever do that?”

“I used to, but I only ride the rodeo bull now. It’s my thing. And I don’t need to drum up extra clientele anymore - those two are new here and aren’t as well known yet.” One of them looks down at them and Xiaojun gives him an encouraging thumbs up. “But they’re really nice.”

“Did they… How do you get a job here?” Hendery asks. He has a fair idea - from the things Xiaojun has told him - that it’s not the sort of position that comes with many benefits, other than staying on the right side of bad people.

“Usually by inheriting a debt. Sometimes by being in the wrong place at the wrong time. A mixture of both, in my case.” Xiaojun reaches out and pulls at a thread on the shoulder of Hendery’s jacket. It feels weirdly intimate. “How do you get jobs in your world?”

“Through nepotism.” Hendery raises an eyebrow. He’s trying to be funny, wants to lighten the tone, but it’s not funny, not really. It’s just the truth.

Xiaojun smiles at him, almost sadly, and says, “At least you’re honest about it.”

“It doesn’t feel good. I don’t want that life, not now,” he admits. “I think I might refuse it.”

Xiaojun has melancholy on his lips and concern in his eyes. “Don’t be foolish,” he says. Hendery thinks it might be too late for that.

“Do you have time— to, you know, hang out?” Hendery asks. He strains his neck to see back to the bar where his friends still stand, talking to a group of travellers with neat hair and wide eyes. First timers, here, maybe. It’s an endearing sight, plus it means they might not realise he isn’t there for a while.  “We could go to your room.”

Xiaojun follows his gaze towards Lucas and Yangyang. “Won’t they wonder where you’ve gone?”

“I don’t really care if they do.” He’s doing the whole honesty thing pretty well tonight, even if it’s only with one person out of everyone he knows. “I’m feeling selfish.”

“You can tell you’re the son of an Elite commander sometimes.” Xiaojun takes Hendery’s hand and pulls him through the crowd. “But I’m feeling selfish too, so that’s okay.”

Hendery has never thought of himself as a selfish person, but now he’s starting to wonder if maybe it’s just in who he is at his core. It’s a part of his environment, grown in his family tree. His father has always told him he should want for nothing, except his father provides only the worst sort of role model, one of wealth and superiority, and his mother provides a quiet disappointment, powdered skin and wispy kisses to the cheek that feel like the cold touch of indifference.

Hendery doesn’t want any of those things, and it hits him that maybe he’s never wanted them, he just didn’t realise it.

“Has he paid for you yet?” A man with a scar along the side of his face calls from just outside the doorway as they open the door to the private quarters. Hendery struggles to adjust to the darkness after being under the hot lights of the dancefloor, allows Xiaojun to take the lead.

“Yes, he’s paid for double time,” Xiaojun lies easily, his hand in Hendery’s as he leads the way into the dark maze of corridors, just like he had led him to his room the first night they met. “Make sure we’re not disturbed,” he says, and the man nods, eyes them with interest for a fraction of a second, until something more interesting appears in his sight somewhere behind them.

They walk hand in hand all the way to Xiaojun’s room and don’t look back. In the darkness of the corridor, and away from the music of the club, every sense - Hendery’s entire world focus - is in the weight of Xiaojun’s hand in his.

“You told that person I’d paid," he says, when they're in the tiny, low-lit room that Hendery now associates with that feeling of home he's never quite felt before. “For your time.”

Xiaojun takes a glass out of the cabinet against the wall and pours himself a drink. “I had to or you’d be thrown out and I'd be in trouble... Do you mind? Does it-– it doesn't bother you to be seen as a client, does it?"

Hendery shakes his head. "It's not that. It's just... Won’t you be down on, uh, expected earnings at the end of the night? Shouldn’t I give you the money, just in case?” He's been thinking about this lately, in the early hours of the morning, during classes, before dinner. Worrying. "You should let me give you some money."

“No." Xiaojun is quick to reply. He drinks fast, wipes his mouth. He's not wearing any makeup tonight. “No. I’ll steal it if I have to.”

“But you shouldn’t have to." Hendery doesn't understand why Xiaojun can't accept his help, and he's scared - scared that one day he'll come back and Xiaojun won't be here, and it'll be because whoever is in charge has found out that he's wasting their time on some dumb, selfish boy who thinks he might be in love. "You shouldn’t _have_ to do anything.”

"We're all slaves to what we have to do, Hendery. That's why you've had your hair cut since it started getting long around your ears." He touches the soft hairs at the back of Hendery's head, and Hendery tries desperately not to keen into his touch. "Maybe it's unfair, but we have to do things we don’t want to do, and we do them to survive."

Hendery sighs. Says, "And when do we get to do things that we do want to do?"

Hendery doesn’t really expect a response, but Xiaojun has an answer for him anyway. "We could do them now.”

Hendery thinks that this sounds like the best of all ideas in the history of this entire godforsaken galaxy. He tells Xiaojun this and Xiaojun responds with a laugh. He buries his face into the crook of Hendery’s neck and whimpers against his skin.

“What?” Hendery wriggles away and tries to get Xiaojun to show his face. “Why do you always turn so shy? _You’re_ not shy!”

“I don’t know. You do it to me.” Xiaojun continues to avoid eye-contact. He kisses him, and Hendery knows it’s a ploy to distract him from the way he’s trying to catch Xiaojun’s eye, but it works, because _of course_ it does, and Hendery kisses him back.

Xiaojun is correct - they have to take the moments to do what they want and to enjoy it whenever they arise. It just happens that what they both want is this, which, Hendery thinks, is an amazing sort of coincidence, because he could be anywhere in the entire galaxy, and yet he’s _here_ , now, with Xiaojun backed up against the cabinet.

Xiaojun pulls away from the kiss. “Careful,” he scolds. “This is an antique.”

“Really?”

“No.” He smiles and pushes himself up to sit on the cabinet top and slides his arms around Hendery’s neck. “It’s a cheap Earth replica knock-off from the black-market, of course.”

He pulls Hendery in closer to him, until he’s pressed right up close between Xiaojun’s thighs and Hendery wonders if he might pass out from just how _much_ this all is. He’s so preoccupied with the way that Xiaojun feels right now - his mouth, his hands, the way he unconsciously rolls his hips up against him - that he’s pretty sure Xiaojun could steal his heart right out of his chest and he wouldn’t even notice.

Maybe he already has.

Time skips forward, it _must_ do, Hendery is sure, because there is no way a whole hour has passed already, when Xiaojun kisses him for the last time and slips his robe back on over his shoulders. “I have to go back out there before they realise I’m not working,” he says. It seems all so unfair, but Hendery holds his tongue. Being selfish is pointless now.

Xiaojun runs his fingers through his hair and applies a light sheen of gloss to his lips and over his eyebrows. “Let’s go.” He holds out his hand for Hendery to take.

Hendery follows him out of the room, the velvet curtain catching his shoulder as it falls around him. A rush of noise and lights and energy floods Hendery’s every sense when they get back to the main floor. “Come on,” Xiaojun says, a light hand, like a feather, at his back. “Back to reality.”

They hesitate for as long as they can. It isn’t long enough.

“Ah! Where have you been?” Yangyang practically barrels into him beside the bar less than ten minutes later. “We looked for you but then we met some people who might know where there’s a poker tournament starting!”

“That’s cool.” Hendery can’t help but grin at Yangyang’s beaming smile. He’s always had an infectious personality, and, even if Hendery wishes he was still behind a velvet curtain in another part of the club, he’s glad his friends wanted to come back, and that they’re enjoying it.

“So, where were you?”

“I just… Are you having fun?” Hendery asks him, hoping that he can swiftly change the topic without too much notice. He catches sight of Xiaojun out of the corner of his eye. He’s near the podiums now, talking with one of the boyish guys in silver glitter and not much else that they’d seen earlier.

Yangyang’s hair is messed up and there’s a rip in the sleeve of his shirt, which he tugs at. “Yes! I won a breakdancing competition and I’ve thrown up twice.” He pulls a disgusted face and then bursts into laughter, none the wiser that Hendery has evaded his own question. “This place is so much fun, isn’t it?”

Hendery nods. He’s half listening, but he wants to keep an eye on Xiaojun too. Make sure he’s safe, or some weird protective shit. He wishes he could do more.

He loses sight of Xiaojun for a while and accepts a drink from Lucas, who is looking less worse-for-wear than their younger friend, but he spots Xiaojun again later, backlit in shadowy corner, talking to a woman with bright pink painted lips that light up neon in the strobe lighting that passes over her face on every other beat of the music. She points towards two men with lines shaved into the back of their head that Hendery recognises as prison markings. He wonders how recently they were freed, and whether this is their first stop since the prison ship. He feels dizzy. Knowing about the darker side of Xiaojun’s job here has always felt like an abstract thing, but _seeing_ it play out in front of him feels like a slow death.

He waits near the doorway, slips into step with Xiaojun as he takes his leave as the two men hand cash over to the woman.

“Are you, should I…?” Hendery bites at the inside of his cheek. There’s two of them, there’s _two_ of them and Xiaojun looks tiny right now, and Hendery wants to take his hand and never let it go, but he can’t. “Will you be ok?”

Xiaojun nods, eyes soft as he turns quickly to face him, before his clients notice. “I can handle it. Have fun with your friends, okay? And Hendery, if you know what’s good for you..." 

“I’ll see you soon. I’ll be back.” Hendery gives his promise, and he’ll be damned if he doesn’t keep it.

 

 

 

 

 

Xiaojun is either in trouble or in demand - maybe both - because when Hendery returns a week later, sneaks through into the back corridors and walks the way he now knows off by heart towards Xiaojun’s room, he has to wait for what seems like a lifetime to see him.

Hendery watches from the other end of the corridor and waits for the ripple of the curtain, for it to be pulled back and the man inside to step out of Xiaojun’s room. It comes, finally, after forty six minutes and eighteen seconds.

(He’s counting, every torturous second, he’s counting.)

Hendery steps back around the corner when a figure appears. He doesn’t need to see this: the end of the transaction. He’s curious though - his stomach churning, chest tight at the thought of Xiaojun with other men, even though he knows it’s his job. He’s never hidden it and it doesn’t make any difference to what Hendery feels about him, but he does worry, does think about it, he’s human after all. Inherently selfish. Elite.

“Have you been, um, busy tonight?” he asks Xiaojun, who is fixing his hair with tiny pins. He dabs rose-water against his pulse-points, serene and perfect.

Xiaojun nods. “That was my fourth client. It’s usually like this at the start of the month, there are a lot of ships pass through when the markets are busy.”

“When–– when will it end? When can you stop?”

Xiaojun looks at him. “I don’t know. When I’ve paid my dues, maybe.” He turns around, leans back against the countertop and smiles. “But one day I’m going to travel. To Saturn’s hub-stations, maybe. They’re meant to be nicer than the Halos - cleaner, less corrupt. Or to Earth! I still have some family there - just distant relatives from my mother’s side and I want to see the real forests before they’re all gone for good. It’s a miracle they’ve survived until now, so they say.” 

“That’s exciting. They must be beautiful.” Hendery allows Xiaojun to pull him towards him. He opens his bottle of rose-water and tips the bottle upside down against his finger. Hendery lifts his chin and lets Xiaojun pat his fingertips underneath his jaw. “This smells nice.”

“Hmmm. What about you?” Xiaojun asks him. “What are your plans for the future?”

“I’m not sure. I think… I think that my plans are changing all of the time. I used to assume I’d just do what my father wanted, but now I’m not so convinced.” Hendery looks at the lip-stain and blush palette sitting on the counter-top. “Why do you wear this? You look good without it too.”

Xiaojun picks up the blush and holds it next to Hendery’s face, considering the colour on his skin. “Because I make more money the prettier I look.”

“I wouldn’t say you were pretty.” Hendery catches his wrist and takes the blush palette, putting it back down on the countertop so Xiaojun can’t get too carried away and start applying it to him without warning.

“No?”

“No.” He shakes his head. “Pretty sounds too delicate. You’re not delicate,  you’re… You’re breathtaking. You’re much more powerful than pretty.”

“I am rather powerful.” Xiaojun smiles at him. His eyes don’t smile with him. “And yet I have no power at all.”

“Me too,” Hendery replies, letting go of Xiaojun’s wrist, and before he can do anything about it, Xiaojun has the touch pad in his hand and the lid of the blush palette open, and he swipes it in a soft line over the apple of Hendery’s cheek.

 

 

 

 

 

In the end, it’s Yeri who brazenly asks him about his secrets one day, as they trail behind las they leave another training class that Hendery spent thinking about things that won’t help him to graduate.

“What’s their name, then?” She follows him off of the training ship they’ve been working on today.

“Whose?” Hendery walks ahead of her until they’re out of earshot of anyone else.

“Well I doubt you’re visiting a Halo hub so often to take in the scenery or try the local delicacies.” Yeri catches up with him. She’s tiny, but she’s fast. She’s better at most of the physical classes than he is, so it figures. ”So I presume there’s a girl involved. Or a boy.”

Hendery says, “The smoked kebabs they sell on Halo V are actually pretty tasty. Maybe they’re like a delicacy, in a way.”

 “You’re not wrong, they do taste pretty good. You need to try the synth-meat one." She watches him as they walk. “Look, next time you go take me with you. I am fantastic eye-candy and I won’t get in the way of your secret rendezvous with your haloite friend. I promise.”

Hendery rolls his eyes, but she just grins. “I’m taking that as a yes, Yeri, you should definitely come with me,” she says, and he doesn’t disagree with her.

He realises, days later, that he never actually denied the existence of someone he shouldn’t be seeing when she suggested it, and he panics for a while - imagines the redness of his father’s anger, imagines his mother’s disappointed eyes, and the prospect of being a failure to his position in an elite family.

He’s spent nineteen years knowing that his life will run a certain, pre-planned, course. He’ll land a well paid and well respected position on the station whether he’s really qualified for it or not, he’ll live in a modern apartment on the South of the station, alongside identikit people with identikit lives. He’ll marry into a similar family, to someone like his mother who’ll barely tolerate him just as she does his father, and he’ll pretend to be happy. Except, he isn’t sure he can do it now. Hendery doesn’t get to sleep until he can already hear his father getting up for work, and even when he does he dreams of being ostracised from his family and not caring one little bit.

Yeri is waiting at the port when he arrives to catch the ship over to Halo V. She wears her long hair in a side parting, shaved underneath. “How do you get away with that?” He asks her. That is _not_ a regulation haircut.

“Easily,” she says. She doesn’t elaborate.

They travel crushed into the back of a Resource ship taking medicines across to a twin station  across the galaxy, between crates of pharmaceuticals that only Elite families, who rarely need them, can easily afford. Hendery tells her, “His name is Xiaojun.”

“Hmmm.” She doesn’t look much surprised by this confession, but she does look interested. She blows a bubblegum bubble almost the size of her head and snaps it back with her tongue. “Are you in love?”

“Maybe.” He fiddles with the button on his jacket cuff. “But we’re so different, and it’s complicated. It’s… ”

“Don’t pretend to be a tortured hero, Wong Hendery.” Yeri scoffs, chewing with her mouth open. “You’re not some ancient star-crossed lover, believe me.”

Hendery tries to explain. Says, “He works for one of the clubs. He’s– I think they own him, in a way. But he wants to travel. I think he just wants to find somewhere he can feel _free_.”

Yeri considers him. She blows another bubble right in front of his face and waits for it to pop before she speaks. “And you?“ she asks him, “Is that what you want as well?”

“I guess it is.” Hendery bites at his lip. “Yeah."

“See, it’s not complicated at all, you’re actually very similar.” She sits back, arms crossed and grins. “I imagine he has better hair than you, though.”

Hendery doesn’t disagree with her, though he _does_ kind of wish everyone would stop being a dick about his haircut. He’s growing it, anyway. He’s decided. Not long, he would never get away with that - his parents might be distant, but they have eyes. No, he just wants it a little more unruly than usual - just a few weeks of extra growth, so that it can be parted and pushed off his face. No one will notice, he’s sure, except for maybe Xiaojun, but that’s okay. That’s what he wants.

 

 

 

 

 

There’s a time that Hendery only arrives at the hub a little before six in the morning, after the ship he’s on fails to stop on the outward journey.

“The port is too dangerous tonight, heard rumours of a gang fight. Pirates from Halo Q have landed and they’re looking for some trouble,” The pilot’s second tells him as she blows gum the same colour as the stuff Yeri likes. “We’re going to swing by Halo X instead, it has the strongest moonshine of all the Halos. Sound good?”

Hendery bites at his lip. “I needed to go to V.”

“No can do, sorry kid.” She shrugs, like he’s a lost cause. Maybe he is. “Look, you can stay on board for our journey and we’ll head back past Halo V on our way home. Trouble will probably have quietened down by then. Or we can drop you at one of the Taxi ports and you can go back to the station, though I’m not sure how you’re going to explain why you’re out here. ”

“The taxi ports… The official ones?” He asks.

She shrugs. “As I say, it’s your choice. We won’t charge you more either way, since you’re a regular customer.” She smiles at him knowingly. Hendery refuses to blush.

The prospect of all night in the tiny hold of the ship is not pleasant, but he can’t use a Taxi port to get back. The Taxi Ports are Control owned transport hubs - his father will be alerted instantly, his Digital ID chip scanned as soon as he steps onboard. They’re to be used for official business journeys and the odd Control approved recreational visits to other parts of the galaxy. only

They are _not_ to be used when you’re sneaking off the station to visit a courtesan behind a velvet curtain in a nightclub with no name. No, Hendery decides, he’ll have to stay on the ship and hope that they can dock at V on the return journey, which, he finds out will be in around seven hours.

He doesn’t sleep and to make it worse there is turbulence he’s never experienced before. His brain feels like synth-meat, useless and sleepy when they finally dock into the port on V, and he’s never been more glad to be surrounded by smog and smoke and loud noises.

He uses the old Earth currency Yangyang gave him last time they were here to buy a cup of bitter tasting coffee substitute from a stall outside the port, where a young woman wearing colourful bands up and down her arms asks him if he’s visiting for pleasure or official business.

“I’m not–– I don’t, like, work for Control,” he says. “I’m here to see someone. A, um, a friend of mine.”

She eyes him thoughtfully. “Have another cup, go on,” she says, taking his from him and topping it up with the thick, tar-like liquid. “You don’t want to see your friend when you look so tired. It’s not attractive. No offence meant.”

“None taken.” Hendery laughs and accepts the top up with gratitude. He looks into the cup of coffee, which is so black it’s practically a mirror. He hopes he doesn’t look _too_ bad. He hopes Xiaojun isn’t disappointed to see him. If he turns out a disappointment to his father _and_ to Xiaojun, well, that would be downright _sad._

There are two small children playing next to one of the kebab stands as he walks by. They laugh, shrieking happily as they play a clapping game together. He can’t remember playing with friends when he was around their age, which doesn’t help with the melancholy he’s feeling - he blames the long night and the bad coffee. The children wave shyly at him as he passes them, giggling as he waves back. In his family’s neighbourhood on the station, children are taught to be stoic from a young age and he remembers only polite nods and tentative handshakes with the Control directors and their children who would come to his house to visit with his father and discuss business next to ignored cups of tea that were only there for show.

He doesn’t remember shrieking with laughter. He doesn’t remember clapping games, or smiling strangers who would wave to him as they passed by, and, for a moment he’s jealous, but the guilt follows straight after because he knows his jealousy is misplaced. After all, he wants for nothing.

He doesn’t even need to graduate from training college, he doesn’t need to amount to _anything_ , not really. His life is planned out for him, written in the stars with blood-ink. Even if he is a failure in his parent’s eyes, they will all pretend otherwise as he graduates into a good job that his father’s paid someone at Control to assign him. He’ll live in the Southern-most neighbourhood on the station, not too far from his father’s ever-watching gaze, and he’ll feel like screaming every morning when he wakes up. But that is what he’s _meant t_ o want. That’s what other people _aspire_ to. He can almost hear his father’s voice - cold and distant - telling him that he dare not want anything else, or so help him: that verbal knife glinting in the light again.

To make his mood worse, when Hendery reaches the club the signs are switched off and the door is chained up. Of course it is. At six in the morning, the night tourists are long gone, _of course_ the club would be closed. Hendery knocks at the door, but if anyone is inside they aren’t planning on answering, and Hendery is sleepy and he’s annoyed, and he just wanted to see Xiaojun so badly that he he could _cry_ right now, which is kind of funny since his father always told him that men like them never cry.

What a fucking liar.  

Hendery has no idea where Xiaojun could be. They’ve never got that far in their conversations. Or, they’ve gone further (talks of goals and dreams and what makes them so angry it hurts) and then never retraced their steps back to the basics like what exactly happens when there are no clients to serve.

Hendery wanders the streets of the hub for a while, back past the playing children, following alleyways this way and that. The streets are less rowdy than they are when he is usually there, but still bustling with locals, despite the early hour. Some of them look at him as he passes, eyeing him with distrust or distaste, or just with interest, but that’s okay. Hendery gets it - he doesn’t belong here. He isn’t sure he belongs anywhere anymore.

 

 

 

 

 

As he turns a corner, Hendery recognises a pair of pretty faces with silver glitter in their hair and dusted along their eyebrows across the street from him. Their arms linked together, they walk slowly, trailing glitter in their wake behind them like it’s their own version of Ariadne’s thread, a helpful trail for the way back later that night, just in case they forget the way.

“Hey, hey you two!” Hendery doesn’t mean for it to come out the way it does - like he’s barking an order at someone - and he cringes at the sound. He sounds like his father and it makes him feel sick.

They stop, both their heads turning towards him in sync.

“Uh, sorry.” Their gazes are intense as Hendery approaches them. _They’re_ intense. “I just–– do you know where Xiaojun is?”

One of them - the taller one - smiles.

The other one, tight lipped, narrow eyed, doesn’t.  “Why? Who is asking?” He’s petite and slim and he looks a bit like a faerie from a children’s story as his face-paint shimmers over the bridge of his nose. Still, if these two are as quick as Xiaojun, he wouldn’t want to get on their bad side.

“I’m––”

“You’re Hendery.” The taller one jumps in, realisation on his face. Still the glitter twinkles over their noses. Together they seem to make a constellation.

“Yeah.” Hendery nods. “Yeah, I am. I’m Xiaojun’s––”

“Oh, we know who you are.”

Hendery presses on even though he doesn’t seem to be getting past half a sentence with these two before they interrupt him. “Have you seen him? I tried to go to the club but it’s closed. I got stuck on a ship getting here and–”

“We’ve seen him,” the shorter dancer interrupts him, the corners of his lips pulling up into a tiny smile as he speaks.

“Where?” Hendery asks them. He wonders if they’re playing a trick on them or whether he’s imagining their smug expressions. They’re still arm in arm, still shining. They seem amused by the whole thing. Maybe they think he’s a joke, wandering around by himself with no idea how to find the person he’s hopped stations to see. He probably is a joke. His father would say so.

He doesn’t even realise there is anyone else there in the alley until Xiaojun’s voice rings, quiet and playful, in his ear. “Behind you,” he says.

The dancers laugh, and Xiaojun does too, ducking his head and hiding his smile behind his hand.

“Shit, how do you _do_ that?” Hendery’s had Hostile Enemy training in cadet college, he shouldn’t be _able_ to be sneaked up on like that. Still, Xiaojun isn’t an enemy despite what his father would probably think. His grandmother definitely would think so -  he’s heard the words she calls the other ranks _on_ their home space station, he can only imagine what she thinks of the people here.

He takes a breath. “Hello.”

“Hello.” Xiaojun looks different in streetlight. Sleepy and soft, and so small. He looks vulnerable in a way he works hard to hide, and he’s wearing thick rimmed glasses that make his eyes look even bigger than they normally do, which is distracting and cute, and makes Hendery happy.  Maybe it’s the caffeine rush, but he’s never been happier to see someone in his whole entire life.

Xiaojun asks, then, “Why are you here?”

Hendery doesn’t answer the question - Xiaojun _knows_ the answer, he must do by now - so instead he just says, “I’m so fucking glad to see you.”

“Injunie, Jaemin - you two can go on without me,” Xiaojun calls to the boys across the street and they wave lazily and turn away, a thread of silver glitter behind them as they leave. He watches them, fondly, until they turn a corner and then turns to Hendery. “I wrote more of my poem last night. The one about you.”

“Oh? What does it say? Can I read it?”

Xiaojun shakes his head. He tucks himself into Hendery’s side, his hand slipping around Hendery’s  arm with ease, and they start to walk slowly in the same direction as the other dancers. “Not yet. It isn’t finished yet,” he says.

“You’re such a tease sometimes.”

Xiaojun laughs and looks away from him. ”I don’t mean to be,” he says. “Not to you. But I really can’t show you it until it’s finished, it’s bad luck to do so.”

Hendery scoffs. Says, “I don’t believe in bad luck.”

“If you were me, you would believe in bad luck.” Xiaojun holds his arm tighter. He sighs afterwards, lost in a thought that Hendery can’t hear. He isn’t sure he’d want to really - to know the extent of the pain that Xiaojun has felt in his life. The things he’s had to do and say and the person he’s had to be to please those around him.

Hendery knows some of it - Xiaojun tells little stories, casually mentioned as Xiaojun pours LiquidHeaven into a glass or sits quietly with his head on Hendery’s shoulder, listening to shouts from the corridor behind their curtain.

Xiaojun tells stories of his childhood on the Halo (poor, fond memories, his mother with jewels in her ears and tears in her eyes), stories of when he first started working at the club (seventeen, confused, lonely), stories of a week he spent on a Vacation ship somewhere near Saturn’s rings, accompanying a Control director (was dressed up super fancy, ate real peaches for the first time, only had to let the direct touch him three times).

The stories are always sad, laced with fear and desperation, even the happy ones. Hendery replays them in his head back home on the station when he should be sleeping, bites the inside of his cheek and wishes he were back on the Halo holding Xiaojun’s small hands.  

Hendery has never considered himself happy with his life, but he can’t deny -  could _never_ deny - that he’s privileged. Years of mandatory passive aggressive family dinners feel so impossibly insignificant next to night after night of entertaining strangers and their sick fantasies for obscene amounts of money that Xiaojun doesn’t even get to _keep_. And yet, selfishly, he still doesn’t want the life he’s got at all.

He shrugs Xiaojun’s hand from his arm, and Xiaojun glances at him, hurt and confused, until Hendery slips his fingers between Xiaojun’s and says, “I only believe in _good_ luck, because I met you.”

Xiaojun bites at his bottom lip, trying to stop himself from smiling. “By the way,” he says, “I’ve stolen your VokalLink.”

“Oh for fucks sake.” Hendery checks his ear and sure enough his earpiece is gone. “I didn’t even know you were behind me until you spoke!”

They pause in the street and Xiaojun slips his VokalLink back into place, tucks Hendery’s hair behind his ear as he does. “Your hair’s longer,” he says and Hendery feels a rush of pride.

“And I’ve always told you the Halos aren’t safe.”

“I know. We couldn’t dock last night because of some gang-war thing. I’ve been all the way to the Resource Sorting ship on the other side of Venus and back since I sneaked out after dinner!”

“Why would you do that just to see _me_ ?” Xiaojun asks him as they continue to walk. Hendery catches a glimmer of fallen glitter on the path next to them. “I’m no-one. I’m the same as Renjun and Jaemin and all of the rest of us, I’m one of dozens at our club alone. I don’t– I can’t _like_ you like this. You can’t like me. It doesn’t work out that way.”

“How do you know how it all works out?” Hendery isn’t buying this. He _won’t_ buy it and maybe that makes him obtuse, but so what. “Have you seen the ending?”

Xiaojun shakes his head softly. “I just _know_ the ending to this kind of story, and however it ends, it’s with tears.”

Hendery squeezes his hand. “Yours or mine?” he asks, and it’s meant to be a joke, but it doesn’t feel like one.

“I don’t know,” Xiaojun admits and they walk in silence until they arrive at a tiny alleyway, shuffling down the side of an abandoned building that Xiaojun explains used to be a bootleg moonshine warehouse until the men who ran it disappeared one day.

“They probably pissed someone off,” he says. “They’ll be far away from here - their bodies will be in orbit somewhere out there beyond the station, just galactic bio-trash like everyone else who goes missing around here.”

Hendery shudders. He imagines being pushed out of the air-lock at the port. Human bodies _do not_ survive that kind of thing. He really has lived the most bullshit sheltered life, he thinks. He really is the stereotypical elite cadet that Xiaojun thinks he is and he’s ashamed for it. ”Shit, that’s–– that’s heavy stuff. I mean, I know that kind of thing happens, but…”

“Yeah.” Xiaojun takes the padlock off a heavy door that opens with old fashioned dead-locks and keys like places on Earth used to and hands it to Hendery to hold as he pushes open the door. The metal is cold in Hendery’s palm. “It’s not very, um, nice, but do you want to come inside and see where I sleep?

Hendery nods. “Definitely.”

The room that Xiaojun leads him to, cramped, narrow and damp, is smaller than Hendery’s personal bathroom at home. It’s a quarter of the size of Xiaojun’s private room at the club, and the opposite of ostentatious: there is a mattress pushed up against the wall and a small chest on the floor in the corner, locked with another metal padlock. There is a chair with flaking wood on the arms, on which is a low pile of tattered books.

“Is this… all of it?” Hendery looks around.

Xiaojun kneels down on the mattress and arranges the blanket over the bed neatly. “Is it not upmarket enough for your elite sensibilities?” He looks up at Hendery, eyebrows raised.

“Okay, I _didn’t_ mean it to sound like that, I promise.” Hendery can feel the heat rise to his face with embarrassment. “I was just surprised. It is cold, though. Aren’t you always cold here?”

Xiaojun shrugs. “I’ve never minded feeling cold before. At least that way I’m feeling something.” He motions for Hendery to sit down next to him.

Hendery sits down on the mattress and leans back, watching Xiaojun carefully. “You know, If I warm you up, you could feel me instead,” he says, staring until Xiaojun meets his eyes, locked in a world that is neither here nor the station as they stare each other down.

As always, Xiaojun looks away first, pink cheeked, a small sigh escaping his lips. “I want that,” he says. "I really do."

“Good.” Hendery smiles. Maybe Yeri is right, he thinks, maybe they aren't so different. They want the same things at their core. "Me too."

Xiaojun's glasses knock against Hendery's forehead as they kiss, and it makes them both laugh. "I didn't even know you wore these," Hendery says as Xiaojun takes them off and folds them neatly beside the bed next to their shoes. "I like them."

Underneath the blanket, in his simple white t-shirt and tired eyes, Xiaojun seems nothing like the thief who kissed Hendery the night they met, but Hendery knows that's just a trick of the light. The warm, pink glow of Xiaojun's room at the club is a stark contrast to the sleepy morning light they lie under, even if it's not true sunlight. Xiaojun looks softer than Hendery has ever seen him, but he’s been this way all along, really. Gentle in the centre, but tough enough to rob you blind.

Hendery asks, "Are you actually happy I turned up here this morning?" Just to be sure.

“I’m always happy when you turn up,” Xiaojun says. “Though that doesn’t mean I think you should.”

He winds himself around Hendery, arms around Hendery's chest, his leg thrown over Hendery's own as he lies on his side. “You’re so tiny.” Hendery laughs. He likes this, he wants to stay like this always, though maybe not here, not in a sparse room next to an abandoned illicit factory with the threat of eternal disappearance always looming. “Are you any warmer now?”

“Not yet.” Xiaojun holds on even tighter, burying his face into Hendery’s neck. His breath tickles Hendery’s skin and the soft drag of his lips right there at the pulse point under Hendery’s ear makes his breath hitch in his throat. Xiaojun reacts to Hendery’s struggle by pressing kisses down along his jaw and making it so much worse - or maybe it’s making it better, but he can’t be sure because he thinks he might be losing the ability to think coherently. Everything he can sense is Xiaojun and it feels _divine_.  

“They say, in deep space survival class,” Hendery just about manages to say, “that if you’re cold, naked body heat is the best source of heat to stay alive.”

“No they don’t.” Xiaojun scoffs at him. “You are so full of shit.”

“They really do! I promise you.” He laughs, offended that Xiaojun doesn’t believe him. “I listened in that class, it’s true.” 

Xiaojun nudges him with his knee until Hendery is looking at him again. “Prove it,” he says, and this time he doesn’t look away. His eyes hold constellations in them as they undress.

Hendery proves his point, and then some more.

 

 

 

 

 

It’s four days later, and Hendery has been asked to accompany his mother to his grandmother’s house for another afternoon of false-smiles and stilted conversation. They wait in the lounge for their official tai cab from the Taxi Port to arrive. Hendery wonders if this is what it’s like to have an out of body experience, because he’s doing this here - playing this part, dutiful and stoic and proper - but his mind is on hungry kisses in a tiny room across the galaxy.

Hendery’s mother looks away from the Window (set to Venus mode #3) and sets him with a barely-there gaze. “Where have you been going?” She asks. Her voice is clipped. She sounds robotic. “Tell me.”

Hendery’s heart jumps. He feels sick. “What?”

“At night. You’ve been going out unannounced.”

“I haven’t,” Hendery denies. “I don’t know what you mean.”

His mother ignores his reply. “Your father hasn’t noticed, thank goodness. Not yet. But you should stop,” she tells him. She folds her hands in her lap neatly. The yellow glow from the Window frames her face unnaturally. Hendery feels blindsided - by the questions, by the fact she knows. “He’ll find out.”

“Okay… And what– what, _in theory_ , would he do?” Hendery asks her. “If he was displeased with my–– with me, what would he do?”

“I’m not sure.” His mother sighs. “Kunhang, you may not believe this, but I want you to be happy. I just wish you could be happy in a way your father approves of.”

Hendery’s jacket feels tight around his shoulders: suffocating and hot and stuffy, and he doesn’t want to be here, having this conversation, but he is. He hasn’t heard his birth-name in years.

“And what if I can’t?” He asks her. “What if I don’t want to?” 

She sighs again, and turns back to the Window. She doesn’t speak to him for the rest of the afternoon.

 

 

 

 

 

Hendery takes extra care to act with as little suspicion as possible the next time he sneaks off the station, though there isn’t much inconspicuous about hanging around the non-human cargo end of the port by yourself after midnight. Still, he makes an effort to talk about plans with Yangyang at the dinner table and allows his father to chide him about his irresponsible attitude towards his future and how he needs to find more suitable friends when he graduates into the workforce with only one roll of the eyes. “We’ll study together,” Hendery promises his father. “Tonight, we’ll be studying.”

His mother stays quiet and for once Hendery is nothing but grateful for her silence, as uncomfortable as it is.

The ride to V goes by quickly. Hendery watches Lucas’ latest VideoLink video from vacation with his parents. It’s eighteen minutes of scenery from a vacation ship that’s travelling in Earth’s orbit, interspersed with him practicing backflips in the hotel pool and teaching cute strangers how to copy his accent. Hendery has to pause the video to deal with second hand embarrassment three times. He wishes he could film a reply video and send it over to his friend, but he can’t think of a way to explain why he’s stowing in the back of a cargo ship by himself, so he leaves Lucas a VokalLink message instead, telling him not to break his neck in the pool, or to break too many hearts on his vacation. Lucas will love that and Hendery can imagine him swelling with pride at the thought of being a stone-cold heartbreaker, despite the fact that he’s really nothing of the sort.

Xiaojun’s not in his room, when Hendery peers round the curtain, but he’s not on the main dance-floor either when Hendery goes back to double check. “So,” Jaemin asks him as he turns around. “Exactly how much are you willing to spend on us?”

“What?” Hendery blinks. Jaemin looks at him as if he should know. Renjun glances towards the end of the corridor, where Hendery notices someone watching them. She starts to walk towards them, just as Jaemin steps up closer to him and says, “You can act, can’t you?”

Hendery just nods.

“Interesting suggestion, but we’d expect at least four hundred to do _that_ ,” Renjun, wearing less glitter but still glowing somehow, tells him loudly, his voice travelling the length of the corridor. “I assume you can’t afford that, you look barely twenty one.”

He smiles at the woman as she passes and she nods back.

Hendery wants to be offended because Renjun definitely looks younger than him, but then he remembers this is an elaborate improvisation (and, anyway, it’s true) and grits his teeth.

“Uh. Right, yeah. I’m not twenty one yet.”

 They wait until the woman passes, slipping away into the next corridor. Her intricate snake tattoo seems to follow behind her, a few seconds slower than the rest of her is. When her footsteps reside, Hendery lowers his voice and asks, “Where is he? Is he okay?”

“He’s okay. He’s, um...” Renjun glances at Jaemin, as if to check what they can say. Hendery wonders if they have a kind of weird shared mind, they seem to do everything together. “He’s in a meeting, but he should be back soon.”

“A meeting? About what?” Hendery is worried; after the stories Xiaojun has told him about the people who run this place and practically the whole of the Halo station he’s been having unsettled dreams of Xiaojun disappearing without a trace. “He isn’t in trouble, is he?”

“You’ll have to ask him.” Jaemin’s frown dissipates and turns into a charming smile. He lowers his eyes and runs a hand over Hendery’s arm. Hendery guesses they’re being watched again and it makes him feel nervous. When Jaemin retracts his fingers, a small frown falling back into place, he says, “We’ll tell him you’re here when we see him. Go back to the dance floor.”

Hendery knows he can trust these two - Xiaojun trusts them, and that’s enough for him. So he turns away, heads back to the main room of the club, where the bass thumps and the lights flash, and where all he can think about is whether Xiaojun is okay.

Xiaojun sneaks up on him, like always, like he’s used to now, and whispers a shy hello in his ear. This time, Hendery manages not to startle at the contact, but only just.

When they get to Xiaojun’s room, Xiaojun says, “I hope Jaemin and Renjun didn’t freak you out before.”

Hendery shakes his head, although they kind of did. “They said you were in a meeting. What— what was it for? Is everything okay?”

“Oh. It was nothing.” Xiaojun smiles, but it doesn’t reach his eyes. He stretches his arms above his head and cricks his neck as he sits down. “A normal meeting.”

Hendery doesn’t believe him. There is a bruise on his right wrist, which shows when his sleeves fall over his elbows as he stretches. “Did this happen in there?” Hendery reaches out. The skin is purple, blooming like a galaxy. Xiaojun pulls his arm away.

“No. That— that happened last night. A client.” He curls his legs underneath his body and takes the cushion from behind his back, hugging it to his chest. He looks so small. “It’s sorted out now, anyway. I apologised.”

“Someone did this to you and _you_ apologised?” Hendery stands up, although he doesn’t have anywhere to go. He just needs to be up, to be doing something about this. He’s _angry_. “What the fuck? Where... Who?”  

“Will you just sit down?” Xiaojun says, ignoring Hendery’s rant. “I have LiquidHeaven, want some? Just a small glass, though. I know you have a taste for it…”

“Do you think you can distract me?” He takes Xiaojun’s wrist in his hand, gently. “Really?”

Xiaojun shakes his head. “I’m not trying to distract you. But I only see you once or twice a week, sometimes not even that. I don’t know when you’re coming. I don’t know why you come or if the ships will stop letting the elite to stow away. There’s rumours they’ll stop passing here at all because they’re worried you’re all spies.” He’s simmering with a quiet anger. “ _I_ live this life, I’m here fifteen hours a day, performing, entertaining, pretending to be charmed by morons. I’m not _distracting_ you, I just don’t want to waste time discussing something that can’t bechanged. I just want to sit and have a drink with my— with _you_.”

“Okay. Okay, yeah I want that too.” Hendery nods. He feels like an idiot. Like one of those morons Xiaojun talks of.

He just wishes things were different. He’d wish on a star if he thought it would do anything, but stars are just balls of gas, so instead Hendery accepts his drink, and lets Xiaojun climb into his lap and stay there until it’s time for him to perform again.

 

 

 

 

 

 Ten is reassigned to the station in the Spring and rumour goes around that he broke one of Control’s rules when he was down on Earth. Returning home is a punishment, and Ten acts like it is too - sleeps a lot and won’t meet up for drinks, and Hendery wonders if Yangyang was right about why he’d stayed down there for so long.

He and Lucas have a seminar with Taeyong, who talks to their class about life after graduation, and how to excel as a representative for Control. His heart isn’t in his speech, Hendery can feel it, and it makes him feel so achingly sad - for his friends, for himself, all of them pretending to be happy to play a part that weighs them down so, so heavily. He waits behind after the seminar, until it’s just him and Taeyong left.

“Ten’s sorry for ignoring your messages,” Taeyong tells him, before he asks. “It’s not just you, it’s all of us he’s avoiding. He’s going through a hard time.”

“He fell in love with the wrong person,” Hendery says. He gets it now, he understands that.

Taeyong looks at him, measured, and says, “You know, we are very lucky up here, in the positions we are in." 

“I know.” Hendery shoves his hands into his pockets. “And it sucks, doesn’t it?”

Taeyong’s straight face flickers with amusement. “When Ten was first assigned to Resource Reaping on Earth, he told me he that he was excited to visit somewhere that was so resilien that it still hadn’t given up despite everything. We did everything we could to ruin that planet - we’re still doing it, still taking from it and giving nothing back - and yet it continues on, still beautiful, still home to a lot of people. We can all take inspiration from that.”

“Resilience in the face of ruin…” Hendery smiles. “I like that.”

“Try not to fail all of your exams.” Taeyong smiles at him. “I think you’d make a decent commander one day, if it’s what you want.” 

It isn’t, but Hendery thanks Taeyong anyway.

 

 

 

 

 

Hendery leaves a thick wedge of money underneath a cushion, tucked inside Xiaojun’s notebook the next time he visits. It takes every fibre of his being to resist peeking inside and finding out what Xiaojun has written about him, but he manages not to - just tucks the notes inside the front cover and slips the slim book back into its hiding place while Xiaojun is out of the room.

He’s been thinking about this for a while. About resilience, about his position, about being able to pawn dumb family heirlooms at the market on V for thousands of old-Earth currency.

He’s been thinking about bruises on Xiaojun’s wrists, and about the disappearance of the men who lived next door to him. Xiaojun doesn’t want help, he’s made that clear, but surely - _surely_ \- if Hendery has the ability to give him the money to potentially buy his way out of the club, he should offer it.

Except, he doesn’t offer it. He can’t, because he knows Xiaojun will refuse. So instead he tucks the notes inside Xiaojun’s notebook and kisses him and tells him he’ll see him again soon, and then he leaves.

He buys a cup of coffee from the stand at the port. The girl behind the counter says, “This stuff is really bad for you,” with a grin as she sells him it, which is kind of funny, but he’s come to expect it. He’s a regular at the stall now, something he never thought he could say about a Halo faux-coffee stand. “It’s so bad. Here, have another cup.”

Hendery laughs. “Next time.”

He can see the ship through the airlock windows, approaching the docking space, and he sips his coffee, which is burning hot against his tongue. He misses Xiaojun already, and he thinks that, maybe, despite what he says sometimes, Xiaojun misses him too. Or maybe it’s just wishful thinking.

Xiaojun doesn’t even try to sneak up on him and that’s how Hendery knows he’s made a mistake. Xiaojun stands a foot away behind him and calls his name, and his voice is thick with aggravation, his eyebrows furrowed together. They meet in a sharp, angry, shape. Hendery has never seen Xiaojun like this.

“You forgot something.” He’s holding the hundreds of notes in a shaking, outstretched, hand.

“It’s yours.” Hendery swallows fear. “I left it for you.”

Xiaojun shakes his head. He looks so upset, so confused, and it’s all Hendery’s fault. “No.”

“Please take it,” Hendery says.

“I’m _not_ taking your money.”

“You took it the first night. And everything else I had on me. How is this different?” Hendery knows this is the wrong thing to say. The worst thing to say. Still, it’s out there now, he can’t take it back.

“I can look after myself, I do what I can to survive, I told you that! And–– and I thought you _respected_ that. I thought we wanted the same thing.”

“I _do_ , I respect you so much.” Hendery scrabbles to say the right words. This is all going wrong, this isn’t how it was meant to go. The girl at the coffee stand is watching them, other people too. He takes a breath. “Xiaojun, look...”

Xiaojun surges forward. He’s still trembling, still on fire with rage and desperation. “This,” he presses the wad of notes against Hendery’s chest and Hendery grabs at the money instinctively as some of the notes fall to his feet. “Is not respect. This is pity. I can’t _believe_ you.”

Hendery reaches out for Xiaojun, the rest of the money falling around his feet. The ship is docking behind them. “I’m sorry. I just thought, I thought it might help you. I didn’t mean to upset you, I didn’t think...”

Xiaojun won’t look at him. He turns away with tears at his eyes, wipes them with the back of his sleeve. Says, “Please don’t come back here again.” His voice breaks at the last word.

“Xiaojun-” Hendery tries, but Xiaojun is quick and he slips just out of reach like water through open fingers.

“Please. I mean it this time.” He looks at Hendery then, and he isn’t mad, Hendery realises. He’s _disappointed_.

He walks away just as Hendery hears the ship doors opening behind his back. Visitors stream out of the doors behind him, cheering and clamouring for the notes on the floor around his feet.  

"This is going to be the best night ever!” He hears a voice, young and naive - just like him a few months ago - as people pick up fallen notes around him. Someone barges past his shoulder as he stands there, in the way of the stream of tourists, watching Xiaojun walk away until he’s completely out of sight, and he’s frozen to the spot.

 

 

 

 

 

Hendery goes to training classes more often as graduation looms. He pretends to be listening, but he isn’t. He can’t. Lucas can tell there’s something wrong, messages him stupid videos throughout seminars.

Yeri, her undercut carefully hidden under her long hair, sits next to him in their engineering practical class and pulls a sad face. “Who fucked up?” She asks. “You or him?”

“Me. It was always going to be me.” He shrugs. “My father’s right about me, I’m a disappointment no matter what.”

“You’re being overdramatic,” she says. “But heartbreak does that to you - makes everything lose sense, makes everything feel like dying, you know? It’ll pass.”

Hendery sighs. “What if it doesn’t?”

“Your star-crossed lovers bullshit is very endearing, Hendery.” She smiles. “But I have an engineering practical to excel at, so I’m going to have to leave you to it and do our work now. It’ll work itself out, I’m sure.” She pats his shoulder.

Hendery can’t see how, but he says, “yeah, thanks,” anyway, because she’s only trying her best, and he appreciates it, he really does.

Most people, he’s realised, are only trying their best. Even his mother, with her papery thin hands and false smile. “Will you be at home this evening?” She asks him over dinner. She’s noticed, he thinks, that he hasn’t sneaked out in weeks. 

“Yes,” he replies, eyes down. He’s not hungry.

 

 

 

 

 

Lucas suggests another trip to Halo V - one last blow out before their big exams - and Hendery feigns enthusiasm with finesse. “Definitely.” He grins, holding his VideoLink in front of his face. Lucas grins back. “Is Yangyang coming?”

“Of course. We’ve been practising at poker. Turns out he’s actually _good_ at it!”

Hendery laughs. “That doesn’t surprise me.”

Lucas says, “I’m still not, though. I keep showing my hand by accident.”

“That doesn’t surprise me either,” Hendery tells him. He loves his friends. He wishes he could be honest with them, tell them that he can’t go back because he fucked up so badly that the love of his life (because, he’s realised, that’s what Xiaojun is) never wants to see his face again. Instead he says, “When should we go? I’m excited already.”

On the day of their trip, Hendery skips classes, forlornly calls Yangyang on his VokalLink and tells them that he has come down with a neuro-flu virus, but that he doesn’t want them to miss out on the fun. “You gotta go without me,” he says. “Go and have fun.”

They complain, say that it won’t be the same just the two of them, but in the end Hendery receives a VideoLink message from the two of them taken in the back of a Cargo ship - Yangyang explaining the finer details of poker while Lucas nods a lot. Hendery lies in bed, watching his friends, and tries to ignore the way his heart aches.

He’s asleep when the next video call beeps through to his Link a few hours later. He wakes up with a start - from dreams of being lost orbit around the sun, clinging on desperately to Xiaojun as he slips out of reach - and accepts the call, half asleep and dazed as he sits up in bed. It’s from Lucas’ VideoLink, but Lucas isn’t there when the image appears. The image is dark, the caller’s standing in a badly lit corridor with their figure in shadow. Still, Hendery knows who it is.

“Xiaojun?”

The light adjusts and Xiaojun’s face shows clearer now. “Before you ask, yes I have stolen your friend’s VideoLink, but it’s just for a few minutes. I’ll slip it back into his pocket before he even realises it’s gone. You’re all so terribly easy to distract.” He smiles, soft and nostalgic. “And _no_ I didn’t kiss him.”

Hendery smiles back. “Good.”

They stay like this, just looking, just smiling, until Hendery asks, “Why are you calling me?”

“I finished what I wrote about you.” Xiaojun looks away, bottom lip tucked between his teeth. He looks back after a while. “I know you don’t pity me, but you have to understand. Men push money on me _every_ night. I don’t… I didn’t want your money, I just wanted–– you.”

“I know. I know I messed up.” Hendery admits. “I’m so sorry.”

“Have you ever visited Earth?” Xiaojun asks him next.

“No.” Hendery wonders if he’s still dreaming. He turns on the lamp next to him, runs a hand through his hair. It’s even longer than it was last time Xiaojun saw him, and he kind of wants Xiaojun to notice.

“I’ve heard that there’s a Reassignment ship bringing some Resource Reapers back up to the station in a few weeks. The pilot will drop by the Halos on the way back to Earth. I want to see the forests, and I’ve decided it’s time to do something big.” His gaze is intense even through a screen. “If I sneak away, off the hub, I won’t be able to come back ever again. You don’t get to skip out on the club and survive it, but I’ll never be able to pay my way out of here and I’ve never much wanted to end up as a bio-trash body orbiting the sun.”

Hendery says, “The Halos are dangerous places, someone wise told me that a few times.”

“Finally you agree.” Xiaojun smiles at him. “I’m going to get out. I’m going to go. I wanted to tell you.”

Hendery smiles. “You should, if that’s… If that’s what you want. It’s about time you get to do exactly what you want to and only that.”

Xiaojun nods at the screen. His eyes glitter in the darkness. “Also, I thought i should tell you that I lied to you.”

“What?”

“That time you asked if I think about you when you’re not around,” Xiaojun says. “I lied to you. I think about you all of the time. Pretty much always, especially now.”

Hendery wants to hold him so badly it’s stupid. Yeri would definitely be laughing at him if she knew how desperately he wants to be somewhere else. She’d call him overdramatic. Xiaojun would probably quite like her, he thinks. And she’d be impressed that he can lift VideoLinks off unsuspecting men with such finesse. She’d probably ask him to teach her.

“Can I come and see you…” Hendery starts. “Before you leave for Earth, will you see me?”

 The wait for Xiaojun’s response is infinitely and unfairly long, but, in the end he nods. “Come before the tenth of the month,” he says. And then the line drops.

 

 

 

 

 

Yangyang rolls over on his bed and says, “It’s really down to _me_ that you found romance.”

“What?” Hendery almost spits out his drink. He has to reach over and set it down on Yangyang’s bedside table. Lucas laughs at him from the floor.

“We’re you’re best friends, dummy.” Yangyang smiles at him. “We know you. And I suggested our first trip to the Halos.”

“No you didn’t, I did,” Hendery replies. “Anyway, how do you even know?”

“We weren’t _sure_ ,” Lucas says. “But now we are. Plus he recognised us and asked us where you were when we went there last and— Yangyang, do you remember his face when we said Hendery hadn’t come? He was _gutted_.”

 “He _asked_ me not to come.” Hendery closes his eyes. “So I didn’t.”

“Since when do you happily follow orders?” Lucas gawps. “You _are_ in love. I knew it.”

“It was a request, not an order, and I respect that.” Hendery feels an overwhelming amount of relief at being able to speak about Xiaojun with actual, truthful, words. It’s like coming up for air after being underwater for a long time. “I owed him that much.”

Lucas stares at him as if he’s trying to figure out what is coming out of his mouth.

“Also _yes_ I’m in love. What of it?” Hendery shoots back. “It doesn’t matter, anyway. After next week I’ll never see him again.”

“What?” Yangyang shrieks. His VideoLink is discarded across the bed, his eyes wide. He’s invested and it’s quite cute.

“Tell us the whole story,” Lucas says. “Including all of the sex parts.”

 Hendery laughs. “I’m not telling you the sex parts. But if you want to know the rest, fine. It all starts with a robbery.” 

 

 

 

 

 

Hendery makes it back to V with less than forty-eight hours to spare before Xiaojun leaves. “I thought maybe you didn’t want to come,” Xiaojun tells him as they walk the narrow alley to Xiaojuns place when his shift ends in the morning.

“I tried to come a couple of times but the ships never docked, so I just had to go back home and pretend not to be really pissed off.” He huffs. “The ships are definitely passing by the station less and less. I actually wished on a _star_ for this ship not to bail.”

Xiaojun smiles. “It worked.”

“Hmm.” Hendery will always be skeptical about and luck and wishes and whether a ball of burning gas can grant them. “You know, you should have kept Lucas’ VideoLink when you lifted it so I could call you.”

Xiaojun says, “The only secrets I can have from the club are kept up here.” He taps at his head. “They’d find the Link if I kept it, they’d keep it for themselves and I’d be in trouble. That’s why I don’t keep anything. That’s why all I have is my notebook.”

Hendery smiles. He still feels useless against the art of Xiaojun’s survival techniques, and forever in awe of his ability to be a romantic _and_ a realist. “You’re amazing,” he says. “Oh, by the way, my friends know about you now. I told them everything, although they had guessed something was up.”

“Well, you aren’t a very subtle person,” Xiaojun tells him as he unlocks the front-door to the cramped block of one-room dwellings. “I’m surprised it took them so long.”

“You’re mean today.” Hendery follows him through the corridor towards his room. “Have you told anyone else you’re leaving?”

He shakes his head. “I’ve left Jaemin and Renjun a letter,” he says. “They’ll understand why I couldn’t tell them before I left.”

“And you’re, uh, you’re sure about it?” His throat feels dry when he asks, because he _knows_ how it must sound - like he’s going to ask him not to go, like he’s being selfish again. He just needs to know that this is definitely what Xiaojun wants, just in case.

Xiaojun looks at him as though he’s trying to convey so much more than an answer with his eyes. “Yes. I’ve never had choices before. This is mine.”

And that resonates with Hendery, it really, really does. It doesn’t mean he’s going to miss him any less, though. That’s what hurts, and heartbreak is nothing to do with breaking up, not really, he thinks. It’s _being_ in love that hurts the most.

Xiaojun shuts the door to his room, and they stand in the stark whiteness - one mattress, one blanket, one chair, two bodies, alone. Hendery grins and Xiaojun giggles behind his hand, radiant and perfect, and it feels like their planets have just fallen into perfect alignment. “So…”

“So, we have, like, less than two days together,” Hendery says. “What do you want to do first?"

When they kiss, it’s more than that. It’s a million stars exploding, it’s the breath knocked out of them both until they’re gasping for breath and laughing. It’s silken touches and the drag of warm lips against cold skin and time passing too quickly.

When he’s inside Xiaojun, Hendery sees only white light and it’s everything, and it’s something else entirely - a whole new universe just for them. At least, that’s how it feels.

 

 

 

 

 

They only leave Xiaojun’s room to visit his favourite food-stall five hours later. It’s a little hole-in-the-wall with a line the length of an entire block, and it smells _amazing_. “My friend Yeri says these type are a true delicacy.” He pulls meat from the hot skewer in his hand. It melts in his mouth. “Holy shit, they really are!”

“Yep.” Xiaojun eats his skewer with much more elegance. “I’ll miss them when I’m on Earth.”

Hendery steals the last of Xiaojun’s meat, and Xiaojun looks just about ready to fight him. “More than you’ll miss me?” He laughs as Xiaojun punches him softly on the arm.

“Maybe.” Xiaojun laughs. “Aaaand, maybe not.”

Back in bed, Xiaojun attaches himself to Hendery’s side and says, “let’s just lie here for a while and enjoy this time.”

“It’ll go too fast,” Hendery complains. “Are you sure time doesn’t work differently in this part of space?”

“I’m sure.” Xiaojun rests his head in the crook of Hendery’s shoulder. “But time is relative.” 

They sleep and they fuck and they slip Xiaojun’s notes under Jaemin and Renjun’s door, which Hendery finds out is in the same building.

They drag themselves from under the blanket on the bed when it’s time for Xiaojun to leave for good, playing silly games to stretch out the time, but it hardly helps. Then they walk to the port as slowly as their feet will allow. Hendery might be imagining it, but he is sure there’s still glitter leading the way, not that they need it. They’ll never walk back along this route, neither of them.   

 

 

 

 

“What’s stopping us from just getting on the same ship?” he asks Xiaojun, as they wait for the ship bound for Earth to dock at the port.

Xiaojun sighs, wistful and hopeful and says, “Everything?”

“I don’t know. I really do think that I might like Earth,” Hendery says. “Ten says it’s romantic. It’s–  there are still cities left down there, still water sources and food. Still proper community. Maybe, maybe I should come. I want to see the forests too.”

Xiaojun shakes his head. “You have a proper job to walk into, you’re going to live in an apartment with a _thousand_ Window View settings. You have wealth and security, and you aren’t leaving that for– for what? A few trees? Your life is set.”

“I’ve never wanted any of that life, though.” Hendery shrugs. It feels good to say it aloud. “I still don’t.”

Xiaojun smiles. “If you know what’s good for you, you’ll go back to the station and graduate and live the life you’re meant to, with your neat hair and your handsome smile.”

Hendery shrugs. “Maybe I’ve realised that what’s good for me is actually you.” He threads his fingers between Xiaojun’s tightly. “Xiaojun… Do you want me to come with you?”

Hendery searches Xiaojun’s eyes for signs of what he’ll say when he opens his mouth to speak, but all he sees is stars, and, anyway, Xiaojun’s answer is drowned out by the noise of the approaching ship coming into dock at the station. It’s a relief, in a way, because Hendery wouldn’t blame him one little bit if he were to say no.

He doesn’t say no, though, instead he puts his mouth close to Hendery’s ear. Says, “If you still have your VokalLink in your right ear, the answer is a definite no.”

Hendery pulls back, tentatively raises his hand to his ear and feels - nervous, slow - but there’s nothing there. “And if it’s gone?”

“If it’s not there, I’ve stolen it. _Again_. So easy!” Xiaojun smiles -  easy, carefree - but the way that he glances behind them to the ship tells Hendery that Xiaojun is just as nervous as he is.

“Xiaojun…”

“Yes.” Xiaojun looks down. His voice is a whisper. “Yes I want you to come, okay? But you don’t have to, you don’t want–”

“I do want.” Hendery says, simply, as if it’s not the monumental, life-altering decision they both know it is. “So let’s do it. Let’s go to Earth.”

They step aboard the ship, nothing but the clothes on their back, a small leather notebook and a couple of very expensive Digital Links and they don’t look back, not once.

 

 

 

 

 

A few years later (three maybe. Time goes too fast with Xiaojun,it  always has and Hendery still finds it unfair even with the prospect of their whole lives ahead of him) and Hendery is alone, lying on a warm bed, his eyes closed, listening to Lucas talk about his promotion on the station.

In the next room sits an armchair with beautifully ornate wooden legs painted in a soft shade of cream. There’s a dresser with a music box and a real window too: dirty and stained with acidic rain, no settings to switch to if the scenery gets boring.

The voices from Hendery’s link are loud and boisterous, Yangyang laughing through the crackle of an out of range Link satellite as Lucas talks, and there’s rain drumming rhythmically against the window behind the bed that sets as a backdrop to remind Hendery that he’s on solid ground.

Hendery rolls over and covers his mouth as he laughs - careful not to be too loud. “Shh,” he tells his friends. “He’s sleeping and I don’t want to wake him up.”

He rolls onto his stomach and strains his neck to see into the next room through the open door. Xiaojun is there, sleeping soundly, in a blouse with sleeves too long for his arms and bare legs curled up underneath him. He looks like an angel, the tanned skin and soft hair falling over his face as he sleeps a picture of perfection that Hendery wishes he could frame and maybe send to his father, who has apparently disowned him in both name and will.

“Ten says that Johnny still has some contacts down there if you two need anything.” Yangyang’s voice is far away, crackling on the line. “He can probably arrange supplies if you need them, though it’ll be a struggle now the ships come down less and less.”

“Tell him thank you and maybe we will take him up on that offer if we have to, but— we’re okay.” Hendery grins. “We’re resilient.”

“It’s a shame you never listened in class and then disappeared before graduation,” Yangyang says. “Or you might have made a good resource reaper yourself.”

Hendery says, “Shut up,” and they all laugh, the noise muffled as best they can behind their hands.

When the call ends, Hendery lies still and listens to the rain. It plays out like a lullaby, and when he closes his eyes, he loses time to sleep. When he wakes up Xiaojun is there, kneeling over him, hands pressed into the bed at either side of his shoulders. The set of candles on the dresser next to the bed is now lit. Xiaojun can’t enter a room without lighting a candle, and they flicker behind him like a halo around his hair.

Hendery puts his hand to his ear instinctively. His VokalLink is gone.

 “Just checking I still have the skill to lift like that.” Xiaojun smiles, pretty and foxlike. He sits up, rocks back so that he’s sitting on Hendery’s thighs and holds his earpiece in front of him, like bait. “Want it back?” 

“Are you trying to fight me or flirt with me?” Hendery smirks up at him.

“Answer my question…” Xiaojun says. “Or I’ll steal kisses from you as well.”

“No, I don’t want it back.” Hendery shakes his head. “I have everything I need right here.”

“You’re full of bullshit.” Xiaojun laughs as Hendery flips them over on the bed. “You’d be lost without this dumb piece of technology.”

“Nope.” Hendery kisses his cheeks in turn, three times each, until Xiaojun let’s go of his VokalLink. It rolls off the side of the bed, he’ll have to find it later, but that’s okay.  

They kiss with the door open, no curtain in sight, and as the fire - the _real_ woodburner, no replica furniture in sight - crackles in the other room, stars explode behind Hendery’s eyes.

  


**Author's Note:**

> leave me your thoughts (and/or come see me @ [twitter](https://twitter.com/lilacsui) or [CC](https://curiouscat.me/rainingover)). we can chat or just send each other nct memes, either's good for me!


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